Erotic verse

A little bit late, but I wonder if anyone else reading the Guardian's guide to writing poetry last week noticed the wonderful misprint on page 19. It comes in the trickle of text to the left of the main body of text and says (and I'll maintain the line breaks):

"The

sonnet's

moist

obvious

feature is

that it has

14 lines"

Rule of thump

A misprint I came across in a report I'm editing today, about banana cultivation in atoll islands. It's talking about how often banana plants should be fed with organic matter and suggests once a month as a rule of thump. Maybe I'm tired and bored (OK, I am tired and bored), but this has tickled me no end. It's like a homelier more approximate version of the law of the jungle. The rule of thump. Let's see if we can introduce into everyday speech. We could start with political discourse. As in: Gordon Brown KO'd by rule of thump.

Error

There's an error in the previous post. Where I say 'adoring' I meant to say 'adorning'. I could have just corrected it but why waste a layer of meaning, albeit unintentional? As long as the ports have names for the sea...

Not to speak of the wonderful pain/paint slip-up from Lion Lion (Tom Raworth).

PS I've also just realised how ambiguous my final sentence is in the post below. I'll be thinking about this and getting back to you with some kind of clarification. Or not. Why waste a layer of meaning?

PPS I'm quoting myself. I'm very tired. I'll tell you why tomorrow. To prepare you for what's coming, I'll whisper the word 'train'. And that reminds me of perhaps the worst printing error I've ever come across. If you haven't read Anna Karenina, there's a spoiler coming up. (On the other hand, if you haven't read Anna Karenina, you deserve a spoiler.) At the end of the novel, in the edition I read some decades ago, Anna commits suicide by throwing herself under a 'good strain'. What a misplaced 's' can do.

PPPS And given that tiredness encourages this process of random association, I'm reminded of a comment made by Julian Bees from the ANSA English desk some years back, when told that human beings and chimpanzees share 90-whatever percent of their genes: 'Genetics isn't maths. It's spelling. You change a letter, you change the word.'