Posted on August 5, 2020 at 9:40 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
The Guardian shared two stories of astute readers calling attention to slip-ups in some well-known figures’ books.
The first one reported was from John Boyne, whose latest book A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom is out in the UK but not quite yet in the US.
Dana Schwartz (host of a wonderful podcast called Noble Blood) was on Reddit when she noticed a screen grab from one of the UK copies of Boyne’s book.
In it, Boyne’s narrator shares his recipe for attempting to poison Attila the Hun — and the ingredients listed are, evidently, also items from a video game.
Schwartz tweeted about the discovery and shared her theory: that Boyne had done a Google search on how to dye clothing red and stumbled upon a site sharing the instructions from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Boyne, concludes the Guardian, took the news in stride, explaining that while he’d never played the game, he would leave the accidental homage in and also add Zelda to the paperback version’s acknowledgments.
The other mistake that the Guardian reported on had the opposite outcome: no comment from the author, but a quiet correction.
Classics student Spencer Alexander McDaniel noted on his blog back in May that the Latin tagline on Sean Hannity’s Live Free or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink was completely ungrammatical.
He wasn’t the only person to make this observation, and it began making the rounds on social media.
The book, which came out yesterday, now has impeccable Latin on its cover: vivamus liberi ne America pereat, instead of vivamus vel libero perit Americae.
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Categories: Today in Books