Mistakes in books

A few memories:

From The Outlander series: primroses with thorns and a spinning wheel being blown round by the breeze. (And Terry Pratchett used spinning wheels where spindles would have been appropriate.)

Blackout: never mind the Jubilee Line, just don't try making a call from a pillar box!

An audiobook (a Doreen Tovey) where the cat Andromache's name is pronounced "Andro-mash"

Pants for trousers: actually this is ok in some regional dialects. Not sure what the corresponding underwear is called. It's such a fraught issue that I always use "underpants" in fanfiction to avoid regional and transatlantic confusion!

There was an amusing one on Twitter the other day - a classic find & replace error. They’d evidently de-Americanised the text to replace 'pants' with 'trousers', hence…….'particitrousers'

I used to know someone who is a successful writer of upbeat romance. In one of her early novels she made one of the main characters the same profession as me, and I spent a very enjoyable afternoon helping her with terminology so that casual dialogue etc sounded convincing. What appeared in the final book was dreadful - and I know it wouldn't have been her as she was so careful to get it right. What is worse, I appear in the acknowledgements so people are probably wondering how on earth I knew so little about my own job!

[quote SydneyCarton]@IntermittentParps Yes, or whatever the audiobook equivalent would be! A character called Sebastian was also referred to as "Sebarstian", or "Barsty" rather than "Basty".

It's the Daisy Dalrymple series by Carola Dunn - she's actually British but has lived in the US most of her life. Perhaps she didn't get to listen to the recording before it went out [/quote]
I usually fill in detailed questionnaires before mine are recorded but something always slips in! Loo-tenant instead of leftenant for lieutenant caught the US-based team out last time. They don’t usually ask for me to sign off on audio.

I recently read a detective book by a very well known author. Part of the plot hinged on one of the detectives checking the 1961 census. I'd love to be able to check it too, but it won't be released till 2061.

Fascinating reading all these comments. I get so annoyed with inaccuracies in fiction that could so easily be checked.
Years ago I read a novel by Ben Elton. He should have known better. The main character was a wheelchair user, in one chapter he was arguing at the ticket booth of South Kensington underground station as to why there was no accessible entrance to the platform. Making it impossible to travel by tube as he couldn't get down the steps to the platform. But the ticket office at South Kensington is down a flight of stairs and there was no explanation of how this wheelchair user got that far.
Wouldn't have been difficult for Ben to travel to DO station and check this out.
I commute to this station every day so this fact really annoyed me.

I once read a book in which a character commanded an assembled mob to disburse!

He wasn't trying to collect money; the writer meant disperse.

I was literally just now reading a Twitter thread about 'misprints' in audio books, started by someone who heard the narrator referring to John Cage's celebrated 4'33" (ie four minutes 33 seconds) as 'four feet 33 inches'

Ah, I hadn't twigged it was audio! Don't know what happened then, except that (generalisation ahoy) American ideas of 'the British accent' can be.. weird.
Google Adam and Joe's 'dog was lost in the fog' feature

@IntermittentParps Yes, or whatever the audiobook equivalent would be! A character called Sebastian was also referred to as "Sebarstian", or "Barsty" rather than "Basty".

It's the Daisy Dalrymple series by Carola Dunn - she's actually British but has lived in the US most of her life. Perhaps she didn't get to listen to the recording before it went out

a moonlit parse-ageway
That reeks of a 'find and replace all' issue.

I listened to a Jilly Cooper audiobook recently where a character says "Christ!" in a drawn-out way, which JC writes as "Ker-ist!". The audiobook narrator pronounced it "Keh-rrist!"...

Another one was a 1920s murder mystery series featuring a plucky young heroine where the narrator was American and had got to grips with Brits pronouncing "ass" as "arse", but had unfortunately carried it to such extremes that the said plucky young heroine ended up "tiptoeing down a moonlit parse-ageway"

Came across a good one in another old crime novel recently. Published in 1974, set in London. Character leaves his office on Wimbledon High Street early afternoon on a working day, hails a cab and is back home in Highgate in 20 minutes. For the benefit of non-Londoners that's not possible now without a blue light on top of your vehicle (pushing it even then) and I doubt very much if it was any different in 1974.

Shuggie Bain (last year's booker prize winner) has the mistake of nurses standing outside smoking several years before they were banned from smoking on the wards.

It put me off the book, being that sloppy with googlable facts and dates.

I've just finished a book where the character's child has a sleepover and his grandparents' an hour away & the character goes home. The next morning he pops his head in the child's room to check he's still asleep.

Same book refers to the Shar of Iran.

Try and do something?

Sounds like summat they'd yammer on about round here.

The odd error I can cope with. We should instead be lamenting the death of the letter H which does appear to have been taken away and shot if DS1 and his friends are representative of modern children.

A complaint I found on Amazon about mistakes in a book

"Try and" was first attested in the 14th century. I can't get worked up about something that's always existed in Modern English.

ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/try-and

"seagull" is a perfectly acceptable word. It's a synonym for (one of the meanings of) "gull"; as are "seamew" and (one of the meanings of) "mew".

"Try and..." may be grammatically incorrect, but everyone used it when/where I grew up.