Letters are the Commonality Between Jesus, Richard Armitage and A Supreme Court Justice

Apparently Vatican withdrawing #PopeFrancis medal cuz has "Lesus" instead of "Jesus." The 4 already sold will be collector's items.

— Catholic News Service Rome (@CatholicNewsSvc) October 10, 2013

I wonder if the minters used by the Vatican were as tired as I was when, after 25 hours of drafting and battling with the WordPress program,  I published my first substantive post on Armitage Agonistes  and promptly received a forwarded Facebook comment saying ” Great one- but the Richard ARMISTAD sort of bugged me a little.”  A Little!  I wanted to die. But I was glad someone pointed it out.

I’d noticed it happening over the last few editing hours when my fried brain was rebelling against its first all-nighter in a long time.  My fingers just kept typing Armistad, Armistad. I thought I’d caught them all.  All but the one in the first sentence.

It has to be true that the worst typo is one that misspells the named “star” of the piece.  ARMISTAD  wasn’t my first screw-up, and it wasn’t the worst.

A while ago, I  was one of  a team of colleagues working round the clock to  file a set of legal papers by a hard deadline  to stay (stop) enforcement of a  federal appeals court judgment until the Supreme Court of the United States could hear what’s called  a Petition for a  Writ of Certiorari.

Hon. Thurgood Marshall, Justice.

The Application for a Stay is made to the supreme court justice with oversight for the appropriate circuit  court (the second circuit covering NY and CT) In this case, it was Hon. Thurgood Marshall.

When something was important, the last round of proofreading would be a read aloud by one person who would read the text from the end to the beginning instead of the other way around and everyone else would follow.

Everything was perfect.  The papers had to be delivered to the courthouse before the midnight deadline.   I was elected to walk the papers over to the courthouse – we had about an hour to spare.

I guess the careful proofreading didn’t extend to the blue cover of the Memorandum of Law,  because, just as I exited the elevator, I looked down at one of the copies of the brief, and saw something like,

” To: The Honorable Thurgoof Marshall … ”  ThurGOOF!

Yes, one letter can make all the difference. Like the  Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry David manages to get the New York Times to print an obituary for his wife’s aunt.  I think the episode is called Beloved Aunt. When Larry returns home after his day out, he can’t understand why his wife and her family are giving him looks that kill.  He picks up the paper to read the obituary  aloud, and booms out – ” Louise Smith, Beloved  —UNT!

Puts things in perspective.

[ETA -already edited TWICE since publication to correct typos]