A Quick Mea Culpa for the Typos & Co., All 3,000 Loving Ones

Emily Carr

A quick apology.  This morning I was alerted to a new comment to my blog posting on Marianne Moore's poem "A Jelly-fish."

The comment is interesting, a student's take on the poem, and after reading the insight, I reread my very short posting. And saw that I had misspelled a word IN SPITE OF SPELL CHECK.  Spell check sends little wavy lines under questionable spellings. And, yes, there they were, the little red warnings wavy as the Pacific. And yet, like the captain of the Titanic (to mix up my oceans) or that fool who sunk a ship off the coast of Italy, earlier this year, I ignored the signs.

And also, in terms of mistakes made: I had not used hyphens in a consistent manner in this remarkably short posting. The spacing between paragraphs was, furthermore, inconsistent.

As anyone who uses blogspot (a child of Google) knows, the blog has a mind of its own, and that willfulness can explain the occasional lack of breathable spacing or, conversely, huge blank crevices between paragraphs.  But only Sarah can make a typo.

Or mess up syntax or create other pretty darn egregious grammatical eyesores. My commitment to myself in creating this blog was to write quickly, not spend more than five minutes searching out an illustration / picture, and then get on with my day, a commitment which is understandable to anyone who has a day to get on with, i.e., all of you.  And yet, I was committing to writing a blog posting, which means communicating with some vague public by means of the tools at hand, which include spell check, native proofreading skills, and common sense.

Enough with the mea culpa. There's always that umbrella excuse, "Life happens." It's no justification but it is an excuse. I have, I hope, corrected the Marianne Moore mistakes and added a link to her bio on poets.org.