Polite Dissent

One thing about the web: it stores your typos forever. A few days ago, I noticed that someone had ended up on my site by searching for the word “venticular.” This led them here, and it seems that I misspelled ventricular as venticular in one of my first posts. So now I’m torn, do I fix the typo, or do I leave it for posterity? I think I’ll leave it.

Tangent #1
What’s amazing is that venticular seems to be a very common misspelling. If you search for it, you’ll find pages and pages of links — and Polite Dissent doesn’t even show up until about page 5. Someone has way too much time on their hands to find my little site on a list like that.

Tangent #2
I’ve noticed that misspellings are surprisingly common in scientific papers published online, particularly the ones that are several years old. Some of it is probably due to poor spelling and editing, but I suspect much of it comes down to bad OCR and proof-reading afterwards. I assume someone scanned in an older paper and posted it online. That would explain all the misspellings of arthroscopy as anthroscopy. An r and n look similar to an OCR program, so arthro- becomes anthro-. You may remember that anthroscopy ended up in an issue of JSA and I’ve wondered was it a misspelling on the part of the letterer (or writer), or did Geoff Johns do some faulty online research and think that anthroscopy was a real word?