'Public Editor" Hoyt Assails Times for Misspellings

True story: the last time I appeared onstage as a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University's theatre program, I was the victim of a poorly edited programme that got my name wrong. No big deal, right? After all, my last name, "Linkins," looks like it is itself a misspelling--like some hillbilly offshoot of the "Lincoln" family did their illiterate best to spell the name, then quite rightly reasoned that since there were more than one of them, it ought to have an "s" on the end. So, it's a fussy name, and I should be used to it being garbled, right?

Sure. Only the poorly edited programme in question misspelled my first name. It went to print with me being listed as "Lason." I've never been able to figure out where they came up with that.

So, I can empathize with what Michele Sugg, friend of Stevie Ray Vaughan was going through* in the story recounted by the New York Time's Clark Hoyt in the lede of his recent 'Public Editor' column, in which he takes his shop to task for serial misspellings. And the instrument Hoyt wields to shame the Times? Let's just say it's pretty blunt:

The fact is, The New York Times misspells names at a ferocious rate -- famous names, obscure names, names of the dead in their obituaries, names of the living in their wedding announcements, household names from Hollywood, names of Cabinet officers, sports figures, the shoe bomber, the film critic for The Daily News in New York and, astonishingly and repeatedly, Sulzberger, the name of the family that owns The New York Times.

According to Hoyt, there have been 269 misspellings in the Times this year alone. One repeat customer? Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Hoyt offers background on the most recent troubles the Times has had spelling Gonzales' name correctly, noting that one of the most recent offenders was Susan Keller, of the paper's Washington bureau, who, in a classic example of the "he who deny it, supply it" (or, as some know it, the "he who smelt it, dealt it") rule of karmic backsides, had earlier written a memo to her colleagues beseeching caution where Gonzales was concerned.

How to stem the tide of rampant misspellery? Hoyt suggests "requiring a personal letter of apology from the person responsible for an error to the person whose name is misspelled." A fine idea--though such measures would almost certainly give Alessandra Stanley a permanent case of hand cramp.

Related:
So Many Names, So Many Corrections [New York Times]
The Wrongest Critic [Reference Tone]

*Full disclosure: As I have smelt it, so have I dealt it--some repeat offenses of mine? Spelling Jon Stewart's name "John," and transposing the first two vowels in "Giuliani."