Warning: this picture is only tangentially related to the following post. You know, like how they do it on the Gawker Media.
A friend shot me a link to this Gothamist piece that asks the pressing question, “Is This the Greatest NY Times Correction of All Time?” Of course it isn’t, ((That honor belonging to this from the week before.)) but I’ll take any opportunity to shame my cohort.
In a nutshell, here’s the “This”:
A Mets beat reporter thought that he was writing a story about how quirky and literary R.A. Dickey (the Mets’ knuckleballer) is. It seems that Dickey likes to give his bats nicknames taken from swords from famous works of literature. Turns out, the story is instead that R.A. Dickey isn’t actually very good with his sword-nickname-provenance (or, possibly, that the reporter who interviewed him is a sloppy transcriber). Eagle-eyed Tolkienistas in the comments section almost immediately pointed out that Orcrist the Goblin Slayer, while a pretty cool nickname, ((But for a knuckleball. Why is a knuckleballer nicknaming his bats? Did he have a nickname surplus he had to dispose of?)) was not the sword that Bilbo Baggins carried into the Misty Mountains but rather a sword belonging to Thorin Oakenshield. Seriously nerdsmacked, the Grey Lady was forced to issue a correction.
The real story here, as far as I’m concerned, is how slow on the take we medievalists were. Dickey (or his copyist) also claimed that another bat was named Hrunting after the sword that Beowulf used to kill Grendel’s mother. Self-satisfied Anglo-Saxonists are no doubt exclaiming as they read this, “But Hrunting failed Beowulf! The decidedly un-Jolie-esque helldam was felled instead by a special monster-killing sword that Grendel’s monstrous mother kept on her wall for reasons it’s best we not go into!” ((Non Anglo-Saxonists, I assure that this is absolutely how Anglo-Saxonists talk.)) But wipe that smug smile off your faces, Anglo-Saxonists, and get your finger out of the air, people only do that in movies ((and at Kalamazoo)) . “Tara” from Hastings-on-Hudson, NY came to your rescue and pointed that out, but a full TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the Tolkienists got their correction in. I know timeliness is not a virtue to which medievalists often pretend ((I, with my irregular posting schedule, certainly don’t.)), but come on, you can do better than that. Here, gaze upon the damning evidence of your pathetically lethargic response time:
