Tuesday, May 01, 2007
The Printer's Devil!
Many people refer to the Printer's Devil as the error that creeps in during printing. The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English defines the expression as 'an errand boy in a printing office'. And an errand boy is one who makes short journeys, or runs up and down, to take or get something like a message, or goods from a shop. The Wikipedia says that a Printer's Devil was an apprentice in a printing press, who performed a number of tasks, such as mixing tubs of ink and fetching type. A number of famous men served as printer's devils in their youth, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Warren Harding, John Kellogg, and Lyndon Johnson. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines Printer's Devil as an apprentice in a printing office. Again, according to the Free Dictionary, a Printer's Devil is an apprentice in a printing establishment. So, stories otherwise, however credibly imaginative they might be, should be unacceptable in good English. How, then, can we call the printing mistake the Printer's Devil? It is just the Printing Error - as simple as that!
# posted by Anglophile @ 10:15 PM 
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