And there are some these days who think that being prescriptivist with grammar is racist/classist, since that POV tends to run afoul of dialects most common in non-Caucasian cultures within America.
Newspapers are supposed to be perfect in this respect, and as maybe the biggest paper in the world for them to make two big errors so soon is a pretty big deal.
Good Lord, I have read the headline at least 10 times without getting the typo, until I saw the werewolf comment and went back an eleventh time. Granted, English is not my native language, but still…
Context really matters here. The Huffington Post has a special hatred for the Times, probably because the Times is old media and I’m sure has said nasty things about the “journalism” there. So they spend every minute scrutinizing the Times for any nasty things they can say back. Slate.com does the same thing.
That doesn’t lessen the problem with front page typos; it does mean that somebody is always looking. Nobody is looking at the HP for its errors in the same way. For all we know they make a dozen every day.
There Ebola. There castle.
And when you’re online, it’s a lot easier to just fix a typo and get on with your day.
In the olde days, there were proof readers to catch errors in the copy AND errors inserted by the type-setters. And nowadays, there are no type-setters and copy writers have spell checkers. So there aren’t proof readers.
Its a sine of the thymes.