Thursday, May 3, 2012

I'm Looking for Somebody

In 1981, the British rock group Queen put out an album called Greatest Hits. I own it. I love it. What I don't love, though, is one of the typos I see each time I flip over my CD's case — and I'm not talking about the missing hyphen in "Fat Bottomed Girls." I'm referring to the title of Track 10. What happened to the e, Queen?

In "We Are the Champions," Freddie Mercury sings, "And bad mistakes, I've made a few." This is one of 'em, Freddie. You're not directly responsible for the spelling error, of course, but you're the lead singer of the band, so you must take the hat. Oh, sorry, I left out the e. I meant, take the heat.

And to think: All you needed was a crazy little thing called a dictionary.


2 comments:

  1. Wow... that’s a good one. All the newspaper typos have lowered my expectation to the point that I don’t find them surprising anymore. But seeing a typo on album artwork is truly amazing when you think about the amount of time a graphic artist was working on it and all the people that had to review and approve it. Out of curiosity, I checked to see if the mistake exists on the back cover of the 1981 LP version of the album and it turns out the spelling is correct there. So the mistake happened when they converted the artwork over to the CD format. I found the LP artwork on eBay.

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    1. Nor do I find newspaper errors surprising at this point, John. In fact, I’d be more surprised if I went a day or two without finding an error in the papers I regularly peruse. Having said that, it’s my job to keep pointing out the ones I find. Somebody (note correct spelling!) needs to be held responsible for shoddy work.

      I agree, though, that certain errors are more profound than others … and a king-sized misspelling on a Queen CD liner note should be labeled as such.

      Thanks for checking out the LP version. It’s interesting to learn that the error only exists on the CD artwork. “Sombody” has a lot of explaining to do!

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