New York Times corrects a 161-year-old article. The original article ran on January 20, 1853 and the errors were not detected until this past Sundays Academy Awards, when “12 Years a Slave” won the Oscar for best picture of the year. Back in 1853 the Times published an article that “told the story of Solomon Northup, a free African-American man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery.”(http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/04/us/new-york-times-northup-correction/index.html?hpt=us_c1). The article spelled his name wrong twice; once in the headline, Northrup, and secondly in the body, Northrop. After “12 Years a Slave” won the Oscar, the article was posted and quickly spread through social media.
It is really interesting that just because of an award that a movie won something like this is corrected. It went over 150 years with out being noticed, no one seemed to care that this man’s name had been misspelled twice. Then nearly 160 years later his story was made into a movie and won the Oscar for best picture of the year. And that is when people cared about the misspelling. It seems like such a minuscule thing. People typo and misspell things all the time, even though we would hope that our printed newspapers would catch these minor errors. But they are human just as we are, and “Errare humanum est.” It also shows how technology is really shaping our lives. Just because so many people were passionate about this error and spread it on the Internet this was corrected over 150 years later. It leads me to wonder, if “12 Years a Slave” did win, would this error gone unnoticed and uncorrected?
Hawks Government G 