With a bumrush in a hull of a wherry, the twin turbane dhow
Many simple mistakes are obvious once you see them — and almost impossible to detect before you do.
Writing in The New York Times recently, Joseph Hallinan noted our tendency to infer what we see rather than actually look closely. (…) One of his best examples is a wrong note in the score of a Brahms sonata that countless musicians never noticed because, for years, they silently “corrected” it in performance. A naïve piano student kept getting it “wrong” until he looked and saw that she was actually playing what was on the page.
It’s the same problem all of us run up against when we try to proof-read a text, especially if we were the ones who wrote it. We see what we know the text means, rather than what is actually printed on the page.
artwork { John J. O’Connor }
