Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Chaise Longue

I was reading a book over the weekend and just about jumped out of the chair when I came across a typo!

The book was Sail by James Patterson. Probably somewhere around halfway through, I read about one of the main characters and a woman (who was NOT his wife *imagine that*) wrapped up in each others' arms on a chaise LONGUE.

It stuck out like a sore thumb. A couple of pages later, the book again referred to the chaise LONGUE, and I was really surprised that they would make the same error twice.

So, I immediately reached over to my laptop and went to http://www.dictionary.com/ and typed in "longue" and got "No results found for longue."

Well...I was just tickled beyond belief that I caught an error and was actually thinking about sending an email to the publisher. I was almost giddy because try as they might, they were NOT going to pull one over on ME!!

By yesterday morning I had decided that I wasn't going to email them, but was curious as to how many others had caught the mistake, and then thought I would google the word, just to see what happened.

Aha! It IS a real word! A chaise longue is a long seat for reclining and is from the French, meaning long chair.


Thank goodness I didn't make a fool out of myself by emailing them.

And for the record, the book was pretty good. Not a 10, but a solid 7.

2 comments:

HereWeGoAJen said...

I find mistakes in books fairly often! One of the weirdest ones is when they accidentally repeat two lines of type. The first time I saw it, I had to go back and look to see if it was really there.

Paulie said...

I have found typos before but they say to re-do the current batch would be too much wasted money.