Authors' Mistakes #27 - Jack Greene & Alessandro Massignani

This time I want to report a case of appalling copyediting (and proofreading).   When I read The Naval War in the Mediterranean 1940-1943 by Jack Greene & Alessandro Massignani I couldn't believe my eyes.  An otherwise interesting and obviously well researched book was spoiled by so many mistakes that I almost gave up marking them.  But I didn't, and you will find their list below the cover image.

#	Page	Description
1	8	"then vice-versa" should be "than vice-versa"
2	18	"Britian" should be "Britain"
3	26	"Baleri" should be "Baleari"
4	26	"ot" should be "of"
5	35	"Pri-colo" should be "Pricolo"
6	36	"hangers" should be "hangars" (we are taking about airplanes, not wardrobes!
7	44	"Albatross" should be "Albatros", because it refers to the name of an Italian ship.  This mistake occurs twice.
8	45	"lead" shoul be "led"
9	46	"diffrence" should be "difference"
10	54	"would named" should be "was named"
11	72	"from in Sicily" should be "from Sicily"
12	74	"Boliano" should be "Bolzano"
13	77	"a air" should be "an air"
14	93	"decided inside" should be "decided instead"
15	96	"maiali was" should be "maiale was", because "maiali" is plural
16	104	"the two of" should be "two of"
17	117	"mading" should be "making"
18	121	"crusiers" should be "cruisers"
19	127	"While touring the port large crowds had turned out" should be "while he was touring the port large crouds had turned out", because it was Cunningham who was touring the port, not the crowds.  I would have also inserted a comma after "the port", but let's not be too picky...
20	131	"withdrawl" should be "withdrawal"
21	141	Very bad grammar.  It could be fixed for example by replacing  "and they promised the Italian" with "and their failed promise to the Italians to provide"
22	144	"Marinkommando" should be "Marinekommando"
23	156	"It has always taken" should be "It has always been taken"
24	159	"commision" should be "commission"
25	165	"approachs" should "approaches"
26	170	"Calcutta, Calcutta and Carlisle" should be "Calcutta and Carlisle"
27	192	"Guilia" should be "Giulia".  This is an example of the common mistake made by English speakers when they write "Guiseppe" instead of "Giuseppe" and "Guilio" instead of "Giulio" (my name...  sigh...)
28	199	"They was" should be "They were"
29	200	Bad, bad grammar: "Four freighters were at sea, three in a convoy escorted by six destroyers that had left Taranto on the afternoon of the 16th, and the other by a destroyer and a torpedo-boat."  Grammatically, this sentence means that the six destroyers escorting three of the freighters had left Taranto, leaving unclear where the three escorted freighters were coming from.  But I believe that the intention was to say that the three freighters had left Taranto together with their escort of six destroyers.  At the very least, the sentence is tortuous and ambiguous.  I would have said: "Four freighters were at sea.  Three had left Taranto on the afternoon of the 16th with an escort of six destroyers, and the fourth freighter was escorted by a destroyer and a torpedo-boat."  Or something like that.
30	204	"nearly being colliding" should be "nearly colliding"
31	204	"such just an attemp" shoud be "such an attempt"
32	204	There are two consecutive "that"s, one before a quotation and one at the beginning of it.  One of the two should not be there.  I'm not sure whether the quoted text contained the opening "that", but I would have removed it anyway.  it doesn't seem nice to start a quotation with "... that".
33	204	The authors inserted a "[sic]" within a quotation after the word "neutralising".  They should have not, because they were quoting admiral Cunningham, and in British English "neutralise" is correct.  It is only in American English that the word would have been spelled as "neutralize".  They were not quoting Nimitz, were they?
34	206	"try and convince" should be "try to convince".  To use "and" after "try" is a colloquialism and should have no place in a History book.
35	206	"Ricarrdi" should be "Riccardi"
36	206	"shipbuilding capacity was not sufficient to replace losses of warships and particularly merchant ships which were being sunk by the Allies in increasing numbers".  First of all, "particularly" is out of place, because "merchant ships" are not a subset of "warships".  Secondly, which should be preceded by a comma.  I would have said: "shipbuilding capacity was not sufficient to replace losses of warships and of merchant ships, which were being sunk by the Allies in increasing numbers".  It would still remain a somewhat awkward sentence, but at least it would be correct.
37	206	"liaision" should be "liaison"
38	207	"the supply situation to North Africa" should be "the supply situation in North Africa"
39	210	"the need to chose" should be "the need to choose"
40	211	"took place at Bremen" should be "took place in Bremen"
41	211	"(known as Ra.Ri from Radiodetectortelemetri)".  First of all "Radiodetectortelemetri" is not Italian.  This term refers to rangefinders that Ugo Tiberio developed for the Regia Marina, but it was written "Radio-Detector Telemetri", or "RDT".  The abbreviation "RaRi" (without any period in between) was used to abbreviate the word "Radiotelemetri", which was introduced later.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to determine the meaning of "Ri", although I suspect that it might refer to "Ritorno", which means "return".  "Radio Ritorno" would make sense, as a radiotelemetro measures the distance of an object by determining how long it takes for a radio wave to come back to the generating antenna after being reflected by the object in question.
42	212	"would be pass" should be "would be passed"
43	213	"Ammirglio" should be "Ammiraglio"
44	227	"less agricultural land then" should be "less agricultural land than"
45	235	"Stormos" should be "Stormi".  The authors built the plural of the Italian "stormo" as if it were an English word.
46	236	"Gioherti" should be "Gioberti"
47	240	A "pearl" of grammatical beauty: "The German 3rd Motor Torpedo Boat Flottilla under Lieutenant-Commander Kemnade operating against the retreating British fleeing Tobruk and sank the South African minesweeper Parktown and some small craft."  MMmmm... "operating and sank"?
48	240	"'Fingerspitzengefühl' ('gut feeling')".  Here there are two mistakes.  First of all, Fingerspitzengefühl literally means "feeling with the tips of the fingers" and is used in German to indicate an attention to a finely tuned intuition.  I would translate it as something like "finely tuned intuition".  The translation ("good feeling") would be in German the simpler "Gutes gefühl".  Secondly, "gut" is not English, is it?
49	241	"on other hand" should be "on the other hand"
50	262	"Of these, 10,932 of them" should be either "Of these, 10,932" or "10,932 of them"
51	263	"'Soldatis'" should be "'Soldati'".  "Soldati" means "soldiers" and is already plural ("soldato" being the singular form).  In any case, the plural in Italian is not done by appending an 's' to the singular.  "Soldati" was the name of a class of destroyers.
52	268	"had to taken" should be "had to be taken"
53	269	"took nearer 60 seconds" should be "took close to 60 seconds", or perhaps "approximately 60 seconds"
54	269	"also played apart" should be "also played a part"
55	273	"they was" should be "they were"
56	273	"but they along with Vichy were fooled".  OK.  Commas are out of fashion, but if they didn't want to write "but they, along with Vichy, were fooled", they could have said "but they were fooled along with Vichy".  Or not?
57	278	"MFP of 200 tons (there were three types, A, B, and C)".  they should have said that MFP stands for Marinefährprahm (naval ferry barge).  Also, there were several types of MFPs, not just three.  And, in any case, why write a comma after "types" instead of a colon?
58	281	"losees" should be "losses"
59	284	"were the PT boats which" should be "were the PT boats that"
60	285	"attack transports which" should be "attack transports, which"
61	288	"Pantellaria" shoul be "Pantelleria"
62	289	"partol" should be "patrol"
63	290	" the where" should be ", where"
64	294	"afetr" should be "after"
65	294	On the same line: "oi" should be "of"
66	294	Again, a few lines below: "oi" should be "of".  How can it be?  'I' and 'F' are not even close on the keybord...
67	296	"as these" should be "these"
68	298	"south of the Appenines".  Two problems here.  Firsly, "Apennines" is the correct spelling in English.  Secondly, the Apennines are a mountain chain that stretches from the Ligurian Alps in northern Italy to Reggio Calabria, at the tip of the Italian peninsula.  Therefore, "south of the Apennines" is close to meaningless.
69	303	"disagreeded" should be "disagreed"
70	306	"Abdeil" should be "Abdiel".  The Royal Navy had over the years three ships named Abdiel.
71	306	"Guilio" should be "Giulio".  Again...
72	307	"It flys" should be "It flies".
73	309	"the Germans had effectively air superiority" is preceded by a comma.  It should be preceded by a full stop or, at least, a semicolon.
74	311	"and were often had not been" ???
75	312	Another "try and" that should be "try to"
76	314	"which was within their means" should be ", although it was within their means"

To top it off, there are even two mistakes in the captions of the images inserted in the middle of the book: Another occurrence of the infamous "Guilio" instead "Giulio" and a wrong date (they wrote 1950 instead 1940).

Almost a mistake every four pages of text.  Even MS Word would have detected many of them.  And what I have is the 2011 edition, not the original edition of 2002.  There has also been a US edition...

Now, I have probably made mistakes in this article.  But this is just bloody me, not the Frontline Books in London.

This is a real shame.  I'm seriously considering sending the list of mistakes to the publisher...

For your reference, here are the links to all past “Authors’ Mistakes” articles:
Lee Child: Die Trying
Colin Forbes: Double Jeopardy
Akiva Goldsman: Lost in Space
Vince Flynn: Extreme Measures
Máire Messenger Davies & Nick Mosdell: Practical Research Methods for Media and Cultural Studies
Michael Crichton & Richard Preston: Micro
Lee Child: The Visitor
Graham Tattersall: Geekspeak
Graham Tattersall: Geekspeak (addendum)
Donna Leon: A Noble Radiance
007 Tomorrow Never Dies
Vince Flynn: American Assassin
Brian Green: The Fabric of the Cosmos
John Stack: Master of Rome
Dean Crawford: Apocalypse
Daniel Silva: The Fallen Angel
Tom Clancy: Locked On
Peter David: After Earth
Douglas Preston: Impact
Brian Christian: The Most Human Human
Donna Leon: Fatal Remedies
Sidney Sheldon: Tell Me Your Dreams
David Baldacci: Zero Day
Sidney Sheldon: The Doomsday Conspiracy
CSI Miami
Christopher L. Bennett: Make Hub, Not War
CSI Miami #2 (Robert Hornak)

Yet another (stupid) email scam

A fourth article about Internet scams.  This time, I want to show you how stupid an email scam can be and, once more, how easy it is to recognise it.  Here is a snapshot of the email I received a couple of days ago:

It is a scam in Italian because it was sent to an Italian email address of mine (which you can actually see at the bottom of the image).  It says that I have exceeded the PayPal limit (never heard of such a thing; have you?) and that, according to a new Italian law (?!?), unless I update my profile information, the account will be suspended.  To update my account, I should click on the link.

When I took the snapshot, I hovered with the cursor over the link, so that the actual link could be captured at the bottom of the email client's window.  The text of the link indicates a secure link to paypal.com, but the page it is pointing to actually is on davidserra.es.  Either this David Serra from Barcelona is so stupid that he shows his real domain name, or somebody has highjacked it.  In any case, it is clear that the email has nothing to do with PayPal.

Furthermore, why should PayPal send an email from admin@webbergrp.com?

In any case, any Italian with a minimum of brain would have dismissed the scam even without checking the link, because the text is not grammatically correct.  You cannot possibly believe that PayPal would send emails with grammar mistakes, would you?

The worst mistake is that the email addresses the customer in three different ways: with "voi" (a plural "you" also used in the past as a form of respect), "lei" (a singular "you" with people you don't know), and "tu" (an informal singular "you").  There are also at least four adjectives that do not match gender and/or number of the corresponding nouns.

I wonder whether this David Serra (or whoever the scammer is) has managed to obtain with this email credit card or banking information.  If he did, I am almost inclined to say that those "customers" deserved to be scammed because of their stupidity!

Earlobes? Go figure!

A couple of days ago, I checked which ones of the more than 200 articles in this blog had attracted most page views.  Here is what I discovered:

Entry	Labels	Pageviews	Freq
OO - UML Behavior Diagrams (Sep 6, 2010)	Computer Science	3918	98
Fortran and Eclipse on the Mac (Jan 4, 2011)	Computer Science	3319	92
OO - UML Structure Diagrams (Sep 5, 2010)	Computer Science	3280	82
Earlobes (Mar 19, 2012)	Science, Me	3000	140
Sudoku - A Handsome Samurai (Jan 19, 2011)	Computer Science, Games & Puzzles	1075	30
Board Games (Feb 26, 2012)	Games & Puzzles	493	22
GLUT in C with Eclipse on the Mac (Feb 6, 2011)	Computer Science	474	13
KenKen Strategies (Mar 5, 2011)	Games & Puzzles	468	14
Homo Novus (Jul 24, 2010)	Computer Science, AI	420	10
Dismissive people, power, and all that (Jun 4, 2012)	Society	328	16

Computer Science, which actually includes everything concerning programming and software development, seems to be the clear winning subject, with six presences and the first three positions, followed by Games & Puzzles.

But, the longer an article is online, the more opportunities it has to attract viewers.  I have no fun to go through all the articles and divide each number of page views by the corresponding time since publication, but I did it for the top 10.  The column Freq is the approximate result when time is measured in months.

Again, Computer Science, at least in the limited scope of the sample, comes out as the winning subject, but look at Earlobes!

To be completely sure, one should check that there are no very recent articles with proportionately many views.  For example, a two-month-old article with 300 page views would not appear in the top 10 but would still rate 150 page views per month, higher than Earlobes.  Well, I checked out all articles with at least 100 page views, and they were all older than a few weeks.

It could still be that a very recent article will shot to the top, but to determine that we will have to wait.  For example, the article before this one, published two days ago, has been viewed so far 12 times.  Six views per day correspond to 180 views per month, but it is too soon to tell.

In conclusion, for the time being, my most viewed article is a 300-word article on different types of earlobes and how I need sometimes to flatten them up when I lay in bed.   MMmmm...

I know...  You might be thinking "What do I care about what a handful of people like to read in Giulio's blog?"  You are right.  But then, why have you read till here?   :-)

Scary AFP Scam

This is my third article about Internet scams.  The previous two (on 2011-09-12 and on 2012-03-07) were about email scams.  This time, I want to talk about a web scam.  Somebody must have highjacked a URL.  As a result, while attempting to access a web site, I was confronted with the following page (if you cannot read the text, right-click it and select View Image):

Scary, isn't it?

But:

1. The Australian Federal Police would never issue a fine via a web page.  And, if they wanted to seize your computer[s], they would come to your place in force and without notice, wake you up early in the morning, and take your computers to their labs.
   
   
2. The domain name, although it starts with "aft.gov.au", is in fact the domain k318843.com, which was registered in China through http://www.bizcn.com/.  No way that the AFP would operate via a Chinese registrar.
   
   
3. If any part of the Australian Government wanted to fine you, you would receive a letter through the mail, and they would not ask you to pay via Ucash within 12 hours!
   

My advice is therefore always the same: even if the graphic presentation is impressive and at first sight convincing, before taking any request seriously, regardless of whether it is for money or for personal information, check the originating email address or web domain very carefully.  Then, if you are still unsure, seek confirmation from the requesting organisation via a contact number or address that you have obtained via a public and independent source (e.g., telephone directory or their public web site).