Typophile

Improper tick mark in the weekday New York Times

Blue

A few times over the past year I have sent emails to The New York Times to inform them of an improper apostrophe that appears in the subscription information alongside the daily crossword. You’ll find it in the word “Today’s” in the following:

Annual subsriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 2,000
past puzzles, nytimes.com/crosswords ($34.95 a year)

Regarding this I have two questions:

1. How can we get this fixed? It’s driving me nuts. My three or four emails to The New York Times and to its public advocate went unanswered.

2. How much of an issue should this generally be? The vertical mark is used constantly in lieu of the “smart” curling apostrophe. I’ve been educated and appreciate the curling apostrophe. Tick marks are eyesores but it seems silly sometimes to make such a fuss about a miniscule detail in typography - seems to over-emphasize the grammatical aspect of an otherwise complex art.

Any thoughts?

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How can we get this fixed? It’s driving me nuts. My three or four emails...

Well, you could try just emailing Steven Heller directly; his email address is on his web site. But if you keep emailing people at the times they’ll eventually decide you’re a nutter.

How much of an issue should this generally be?

Given that only anal retentive designers care, and the general public is essentially ignorant of the issue and quite happy to use tick marks instead, it really shouldn’t be much of an issue. What we really need to do is get a competent US government willing to throw out the English measurements so those stupid inch and foot marks can come off of keyboards altogether.

Nick Shinn

Sounds like a job for Stephen Heller.

david h

don’t puzzle over those puzzles :)

aluminum

Start mailing them suspiciously wrapped letters stating your demands that they fix that egregious error. Also include a bit of white powder. That should get their attention.

Patricia Fabricant

The public advocate seems singularly useless to me. Just a bit of navel contemplating. You could also try the crossword editor.

Blue

Yeah, I agree that this is not such a big deal that I’m going to spend much time to try to fix it. I’ll come off as a nutball. But it seems as relevant as a small grammatical error - and The New York Times should be getting it right, especially if it’s something that’s there every day.

However, on your point, jpad that “Given that only anal retentive designers care, and the general public is essentially ignorant of the issue” - would you extend that to other aspects of typography s

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