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Hello Sternal Journalists,
Boy, I am poor at spelling. The only thing I tried to get right last week was how to spell the big vast expanse with sand and brambles, and instead I spelled it like the big bowl of ice cream with sprinkles and syrup. I misspelled “desert” as “dessert.”
If you missed the post, I’ve since fixed the error, but by all means, check it out! It’s a good post! People were responsive to it, and only half of the responses had to do with my embarrassing spelling error.
In case you’re wondering how two words that are so close in spelling mean such different things, desert comes from the Latin desertum, meaning “things abandoned,” and dessert comes from the French dessevir, meaning “clear the table.”
Those are actually still pretty similar concepts (“abandoning things” and “clearing the table”), so I really don’t feel so bad.
But, to feel even less bad, I did some perusing of the history of typographical errors this evening, and I came across the greatest two typos of all time. Allow me to introduce you to…
The Wicked Bible
In 1631, a reprint of the King James bible was published by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, royal printers a.k.a. the guys who were supposed to get it right.
Barker, in fact, was the printer of the original King James Bible in 1611, and had inherited the “bible patent” from his father, Christopher Barker, who had been printer to Queen Elizabeth I.
But his reprint did not go quite as well because he and his colleague oversaw two pretty major errors:
In the little Ten Commandments bit—you’ve heard of it—instead of “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” our boys Robbie and Marty aaaccidentally wrote “Thous shalt commit adultery.” Eek!
And then (to me) even more exciting, somehow they typed “greatness” as “great-asse,” so there’s a part in this LITERAL ROYAL BIBLE that says “Behold, the Lord our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse.”
How has nobody told me that before?! What did we do to deserve a reality this delicious?
Anyway, they were each fined the equivalent of $50,000 pounds and Barker died in debtor’s prison, so not the happiest story in the world, but you gotta find things in this crazy world to chuckle at and I can’t help but get a giggle out of this one.
Plus it makes me feel way better about misspelling desert. If you want to read more about the Wicked Bible, I learned all of that from Wikipedia.
Anyway,
Recommendations!
Summer of Soul. Documentary. This Questlove-directed film about the Harlem Cultural Festival, a six-week event during the summer of 1969, is outstanding. I watched it on my phone on a plane and I shouldn’t have, but also it was so much fun and so much larger than life, that I barely remembered I was airborne staring at a tiny screen. It’s fun, it’s educational, it’s moving. It’s on Hulu. Watch it this week.
House of Gucci. Film. Another absolutely over-the-top movie in a completely different way. All I knew about this movie was “fa-their, sone, and ‘ouse ove Gooo-chi,” and in some ways, that’s all it is. But it’s also all it needs to be? The outfits are amazing, the accents are terrible, but all of it’s perfect. I will watch it again within the month.
Roll With The New. Comedy Album. I don’t know if I’ve ever listened to Chris Rock’s sophomore stand-up album all the way through, but it included a lot of my favorite jokes of his that I used to download illegally on Limewire, so I decided to give it a listen all the way through. And I’m glad I did. The opening sketch, “Crickets,” which I’d definitely never heard, is one of my favorite parts.
Anyway, that’s all for now! Much love to all of you, and here’s hoping you find some time this week to shake what the good lord gave you, and apparently gave himself too.
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos (sometimes).