Control Engineering

Peter Welander

See your mistakes carved in stone
April 2, 2008

Brace yourself for some disappointment: There are, occasionally, mistakes in Control Engineering. Some are misspelled words, some relate to incorrect Web addresses, some are inconsistencies in style, some are factual errors, and some relate to punctuation. When they occur in something online, we can go back and fix it easily enough. Sometimes they creep into the actual magazine, where they survive as long as someone keeps the copy. But let's face it, once a new issue comes out, we tend to forget the older ones. Memories fade.

So this morning, I have sympathy for Lou Cella. He's the guy who made the statue of Ernie Banks which is now outside Wrigley Field where the Chicago Cubs play. The pedestal of the statue has one of Banks' famous sayings carved in the granite: "LETS PLAY TWO." That's exactly the way it's worded. There's no apostrophe. For all the people who saw the stature before its unveiling, nobody seemed to catch the typo. Many (most?) of the people who have seen the statue also don't see a problem, but the sculptor says he'll take care of it and add the missing bit of punctuation.

You can always add something, I suppose. At least it doesn't say "LET'S PLAY TOO." Of course that saying would be correct as well, but with a different meaning. Who knows, maybe that's what Ernie meant in the first place. Hmmm... Maybe that needs a comma. "Let's play, too." Hmmm...

Posted by Peter Welander on April 2, 2008 | Comments (0)