Better late than never, we guess!
This week, The New York Times was informed about a mistake they had made regarding Solomon Northup, the man whose life story is told in 12 Years A Slave.
But their error wasn’t one that was printed recently. Hardly.
This mistake was made back in 1853!
161 years before the tale of his traumatic ordeal went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, Mr. Northup was featured in an article in the NYT. And the paper misspelled his name!
Twice!
A reader named Rebecca Skloot happened to find the typos while browsing the Times’ archives. After pointing it out to them, they printed this correction:
But if you think Rebecca deserves a job copyediting and proofreading for the paper, she wants you to know she’s not the woman for the job! She admitted in a tweet:
.@Loukas_RS Hah. The irony, of course, is that I'm a terrible speller and proofreader.
— Rebecca Skloot (@RebeccaSkloot) March 4, 2014
Not this time you weren’t!
Nice catch, gurl!
We’re happy Solomon finally got the correction he deserves!