'Ignorance, Madam, Pure Ignorance'

Like any reasonably honest but not too honest person, I hate making mistakes in print. It’s embarrassing and sloppy, often implying a lazy contempt for readers and the truth. 

While covering the corruption trial of a city official in Indiana more than forty years ago, I got something significantly wrong. The story was played on the front page and was avidly read by a lot of readers. Complaints and demands for retraction and correction flooded in. So did accusations that I had done it on purpose to slander the accused. I had to write a fairly lengthy correction and apology, which the editors had “lawyered” (a common verb among journalists), and it was published in the next day’s editions. I felt face-burningly embarrassed for a long time.

 

I recently misdated a literary event in a blog post. It was a silly, careless slip (actually, a mathematical error) which I have since corrected. By now I ought to be accustomed to the ferocity of online fault-finding, especially when the matter is trivial. An anonymous reader noticed my goof and delivered a strident sermon on my idiocy, followed by several other overheated emails. I encourage readers who detect legitimate errors to inform me immediately. A blog is strictly an amateur operation when it comes to quality assurance. I want to get it right, so readers’ help is always appreciated.

 

I’m reminded of a passage in The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, published in six volumes between 1978 and 1984. George Lyttleton (1883-1962) was a longtime housemaster and English teacher at Eton. Rupert Hart-Davis (1907-99) was a publisher and editor probably best remembered for editing the Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962). Hart-Davis had been Lyttleton’s student at Eton in 1925-26. The men met again at a dinner party in 1955 and started a regular correspondence that continued until Lyttleton’s death in 1962. Here is Lyttleton, in a passage that reminds me of my mistake and my perturbed reader:

 

“Do you ever get things quite wrong? Because here is the perfect defense: ‘What is obvious is not always known, what is known is not always present. Sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance; slight avocations will seduce attention. And casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning.’ Isn’t it perfect? Johnson, of course.”

 

Lyttleton is quoting from the “Preface” to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its characteristic tone of mingled humility and audacity. Lyttleton’s letters are peppered with casual references to Johnson’s life and work. In this context, such allusions are never stuffy or deployed in a show-off manner. They amount to the small talk of civilized men.

 

Johnson himself was not immune to error. In the first edition of his Dictionary he defined pastern as “the knee of a horse.” In fact, that definition refers to the fetlock. Boswell tells us that some years later, when a woman asked why he had made such a careless error, Johnson replied, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.”