Editorial corrections are typically boring—little notes explaining that a fine detail, like a date or the spelling of name, was slightly off and needed to be fixed. Though they’re important to identify, they’re also usually not particularly interesting. Journalist Cleuci de Oliveira, though, has been curating a Twitter thread of the times when this isn’t the case, highlighting the very best in reporters making inadvertently hilarious mistakes.
Among these gems are delightful fuck-ups on a wide array of topics that extends from religion to pop culture, the latter of which is shown best in a Brazilian magazine’s mischaracterization of a politician as a big-time Pixar fan rather than an amateur student of Russian literature.
Elsewhere in the arts world, we find a jazz “tenorist” referred to as a “terrorist” and the kind of My Little Pony naming errors bound to have enraged hundreds of adult men on the internet. There’s also a valuable clarification regarding nipples and some in-depth work clearing up errors related to Tolkien weaponry.
Elsewhere, we learn the crucial difference between “entertaining” and “entering” one’s partner and that Halloween novelty names absolutely rule when taken out of context (“she is Jillian C. York, not Chillian J. Yikes!”).
Considering how deeply unfunny most of the news is, de Oliveira’s thread is a breath of fresh air. Familiar publication fonts, so often associated with the latest in modern horror, are instead used to present deadpan facts about cinematic sex scenes and overweight statues. It’s a nice vision of a world that’s ridiculous in other ways than the usual—and a good excuse to wince in second-hand embarrassment at the kind of mistakes that only inferior outlets without our 173 year track record of untarnished reporting would ever make.
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