Wurst of times: How typos can change history

It was such a fine description of our Donald John Trump that I was inflicted with a real second of “wish I’d written that” envy.

Apparently, so is Trump.

Trouble is, Einstein and his press office didn’t wield their inventive grasp of linguistics to unwittingly trigger an international incident.

“Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons programme that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders claimed in an official statement on the last day of April.

The implications of defying the 2015 nuclear deal, and presiding over a rollicking but secretive campaign to pulverise swathes of the planet, are non-trivial. Look at what happened to Iran’s neighbour to the west back in 2003. And it didn’t even have weapons of mass destruction.

“We spent $2-trillion, thousands of lives. Obviously, it was a mistake,” Trump droned in a 2016 presidential election debate with none other than Jeb Bush, former US President George W Bush’s younger brother.

No small irony, then, that just more than two years later the Trump administration would do little to assuage Americentric fears of foreign domination by momentarily turning Iran’s non-nuclear-weapons programme into a full-blown plot to take over the world. It had come down to a single letter. As the statement’s hastily corrected version reveals, “has” should have been “had”, and was put down to a “clerical error” rather than, more appropriately perhaps, a political stuff-up of global consequence.

But who cares about diplomatic delicacies these days?

To paraphrase the man himself, we can make mistakes. Sure. But, even a drunken department editor of a newspaper in a ****hole African country knows that a typo in an opening paragraph is a red flag for whatever follows: so it’s the first thing you proofread. Backwards. Back in the day, my editor loved to slur this lesson at all newsroom recruits, cub and veteran, even – or especially – amid his post-boozy-lunch pomp, swagger and ceremony. We awaited these sozzled displays of editorial machismo – they were at once entertaining and chilling.

You never knew when next a mini-warhead – such as the resident pilates ball or vuvuzela – would whoosh past your head. Or his sabre-rattling wit would cut you to the quick, and leave you snivelling into your Simba chips because you refused to share them with him. The only certainty was that something would go awry some time after 14:30.

Behind me sat a multilingual journalist with a history at the European broadsheets. Tie forever slung over his shoulder, it seemed he was in the constant act of dining to sustain the headline feature wobbling just above his constricted belt. He was always on the phone to, say, London, Paris, Munich, Moscow – in the local vernacular. Their, or, when simply thrashing out articles on his keyboard, his own distinct vocalisations. This inimitable native language involved belching words starting with the letter “b”. “Bulawayo” was a firm favourite, often followed by the names of two of the paper’s star writers. Bless.

When the business end of the alphabet got boring, he settled on a pretty, pint-sized editor good at raising the male mercury in her collection of comely stilettos. One day she clickety-clacked over to him, grabbed the big man by the collar and hissed, “If you burp my name again, I’ll ****ing kill you.” It was effective. He moved on to the next letter in line.

These unscheduled sonic explosions happened with such prepossessing force and regularity, especially when the office was quiet, that I never did work out if the man had a real chronic tic disorder or was just having everyone on. When offered his own sound-proof booth away from the glare of the office’s open-plan design, he declined. The strangest thing about the situation was that it was not to be spoken of. He was esteemed.

It was the most distracting environment I ever had to work in, but our opening paragraphs were always unassailable.

The erroneous nuclear statement emerging from the White House didn’t even have to apply the first-paragraph principle, for the trifling reason that it’s all of a paragraph long.

Yet, a month after issuing a piece of copy that would have invited at least one newsroom vuvuzela to be aimed at her inner ear, the secretary of arguably the most powerful press office on earth is still in her job, free to sow chaos.

Think ‘chaos’ is a strong word?

Chaos Theory is a branch of mathematics. It holds that small changes in dynamic systems may trigger vast differences in the final outcome. The famous example you may know: the flap of a butterfly’s wing in China, for argument’s sake, causes a hurricane in Texas.

Other seemingly inconsequential examples of misplaced letters or punctuation can redirect personal microhistory.

(For the record, more technical accounts claim that the errant “hyphen” was an “overline”: a horizontal line you can place above a letter or symbol. Perhaps “hyphen” is just easier to explain to the public. And Clarke might have reasoned that “hyphen” had a nicer ring to it.)

Either way, we can conclude from this that missing punctuation is not without historical import – especially in the American context.

But errors in the digisphere. Now there’s an underestimated thing.

The architect of an original “clerical error” that also started its life as a now-defunct tweet can effortlessly delete her tracks even after the butterfly has fluttered its wings. DM