Here are my nominations:

1. In a Greek text: In Volume I of R. D. Dawe’s Teubner Sophocles (1975), the first word of Oedipus Tyrannus is misspelled. The fact that it’s a one-letter word is particularly impressive:

 τέκνα Κάδμου τοῦ πάλαι νέα τροφή

This was corrected to Ὦ in the second edition (1984).

2. In a Latin text: In D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s Teubner text of Horace, the last word of the Horatian corpus is misspelled, turning Horace’s leech who will not let go until full of blood into a bird, specifically a swallow:

non missura cutem nisi plena cruoris hirundo

I’m told this was corrected to hirudo in later printings.

3. In a secondary source: In the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, II: Latin Literature (253), one of the most famous sentences in the Latin language is botched:

Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientiam nostram?

It looks like some officious proofreader ‘corrected’ the case of the last two words, forgetting the rule about ‘utor, fruor, fungor, vescor, potior, and their compounds’ and assuming that abutor takes the accusative like a normal verb.

Just as some of the minor poetasters of the 17th century would be utterly forgotten today if they had not been fortunate enough to be mocked in Pope’s Dunciad, some of the bands of the late 20th century, including many that were and are admired by critics or the general public or both, will only be remembered in a century or two because they were fortunate enough to be mocked by Beavis and Butt-Head.

1. Misreading two lines in a Chicagoboyz post, a review of a book on the fall of the Roman Empire. They give the table of contents, which includes these lines:
         1. Romans 3
         2. Barbarians 46
   I couldn’t help reading that as a football score — Romans 3, Barbarians 46 — which is not a bad summary of the worst part of the fifth century.
2. Finding Opera Quae Fuperfunt as a title in the ABE Books data base.
3. While still half-asleep at 6:40 am yesterday, I thought of a good title for a novel about a decadent esthete with an NRA membership: Molon La-Bàs.

Elderly Nova Scotian Mrs. Fiedke explains why she refuses to fly out of Barcelona:

“I’m a strict believer, in fact, a Witness, but I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don’t. I’ve been told the Scandinavian airlines are fairly reliable in that respect.”

(Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat, end of Chapter IV)

Update: (7/16/06, 10:20pm)

Maybe Mrs. Fiedke is right. At least so says the BBC’s 10 Things We Didn’t Know column (þ A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance):

8. Devout Orthodox Jews are three times as likely to jaywalk as other people, according to an Israeli survey reported in the New Scientist. The researchers say it’s possibly because religious people have less fear of death.

Terry Teachout’s life of H. L. Mencken is titled The Skeptic. Given Mencken’s taste (and aptitude) for invective, it might just as easily have been titled The Skoptic — not that anyone outside of Classics departments would know what that means.

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It’s rather like getting tenure.)

(Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 177)