No one likes finding typos in their work, especially when they're about to face the Statehouse media corps. For this reason -- and for his recovery from what must have seemed like an unavoidable disaster -- Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, thixs week scored what in my opinion is the best recovery of the year (so far) from a potential public relations embarrasment.
The story begins with this picture by Frank Espich, accompanying an article in Tuesday's Star about the House Republican Caucus Legislative Agenda. The caption read:
"This year's goals: House Speaker Brian C. Bosma (foreground) and other House Republicans met Monday morning in the House chambers to announce their 2006 legislative agenda. The visual aid contains a printer's error. -- Frank Espich / The Star"
Like any good wordsmith, I immediately set out to find the typo.
I read the poster several times. No typo found.
Figuring that typos occur more often in body copy than in headlines, I began reading the copy from the bottom up -- a tried and true copy editor's trick to find typos.
Hmmm. "Energy Policy." I carefully spelled both words in my mind. No problem with them. I moved up to the next line -- "Protecting Children." No misspellings there, either. I kept moving up until I reached the top line, "Job Creation." By this time, I had memorized the House GOP platform.
Not to be defeated, I tried another copy-editing trick. I read the words out loud, backwards, from the bottom in another attempt to find the typo. But everything seemed literally letter perfect. At this point, I could have recited the GOP platform in my sleep. And I was going nuts trying to find the typo.
Finally, I looked at the headline on the poster. "House Republican Legislative Agenda." No problem with that, spelling-wise. Now I felt I had studied the poster enough that I could competently give Speaker Bosma's speech for him.
So I took a visual step back. I studied the poster in its entirety. Then it hit me.
Now, I'm as prone as the next person to the annual January disease of dating checks and other documents with the previous year. It finally dawned on me when I took a broad view of the poster: This is 2006, not 2005.
Printer gremlins like this one can hit anyone, regardless of party or other perspective. Just a few weeks ago, I ordered some presentation poster boards for a client and the word "tax" came back spelled as "pax." I ordered the tax presentation board by telephone to supplement boards I already had in hand. I spelled out nearly every word on the new board except "tax." Who could mess up "tax?" Fortunately, that particular poster could be -- and was -- dropped from the presentation without damage.
Speaker Bosma had no such choice. The poster board was essential to his presentation -- as the Star photo makes abundantly clear. So the Speaker went on with the show. He must have thought the error was glaring. Everybody on his staff must have thought it was glaring. You have to empathize with them.
But the typo wasn't glaring. In my case, I would not have noticed the typo if the Star copy editor's caption had not called attention to it. But as a result of the photo caption, I studied that poster for about five or ten minutes in search of the error. By this time, I certainly knew the talking points for the House Republican platform. What a great racket to get people to read the talking points!
The Speaker should be glad he didn't let the typo deter him from using the graphic in his presentation to the press corp. It's a lesson to the rest of us that a typo isn't necessarily a reason to go ballistic just before a presentation or a news conference. Just keep going, gracefully.
That's why this lemons-to-lemonade incident has to rank among the best p.r. recoveries of the year (so far). Of course, the fortunate assist from the unknown copy editor's caption -- drawing attention to the typo but not identifying where specifically the typo occurred -- helped Speaker Bosma capture the rapt attention of word lovers like me across Central Indiana.
It certainly was not what Speaker Bosma planned. But it worked.
The word "aplomb" was invented for situations just like this.
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