Reuter’s Royal Screw-Up

Reuters confirm the image of Queen Elizabeth as a really old woman who does nothing but sit on her tuchus all day.

Typos are the bane of a journalist’s life. No matter how many times an article is spellchecked, proof-read and copy-edited, you’ll still find that where you meant to write ‘Tony Blair today defended his actions over the Iraq conflict,’ you actually wrote ‘Tongy Blirfish tiddle infendip crzwwldgdch spong spong someone get me out of here.’

 

A round of applause, then, to Reuters, who manged to take the typo to new levels today, with an online article about the genetics of honey bees which claimed that Queen Elizabeth lays up to 2,000 eggs a day.

 

Somehow, every time they meant to refer to the queen bee, the phrase ‘Queen Elizabeth’ was substituted instead.

 

This led to the article informing us that ‘Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day.’

 

This was after we were told that ‘With its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honey bee genome could also improve the search for genes linked to social behaviour.’

Also, the New Zealand Herald picked up this story and noted a previous error on its website, “Some years ago, a story on the Herald.co.nz website had the same mishap, resulting in references to Saddam Hussain being changed to Saddam’s Hussies.”

About the Author

An Australian immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave has been blogging since early 2003.

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