US eyes Darwin Port prise.

That, in case you missed it, was the hedline on the frunt page of last Chewsday’s Australain. I was initially inclined to give the subeditor responsible the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps ‘prise’ had been a deliberate choice; a punning reference to the geo-political leverage which control of the port in question might give the US government in its increasingly frosty dealings with China? But as I’m sure my page-mate Kel will confirm, even according to American spellcheck software, ‘prise’ is a verb, and one which cannot moonlight as a noun. The only other possible rationale is that the subeditor responsible was so pleased to have come up with the eyes/prise rhyme that he or she forgot to even deploy the spellcheck. But in order for the reader to know to read the headline with the requisite dum, dum, dum, de-de-de-dum stress pattern (and thereby stop it being a contender for Dullest Headline of the Year),  it would have needed a comma after ‘eyes’. So no, there really is no excuse for what might well be the most appalling typo in the history of Australian journalism. And the subeditor responsible really does deserve to be marched into a public place and have the back of his or her legs slapped. Assuming that it is a him or her.

And no, I’m not worried about offending non-binary News Corp employees by making insensitive pronoun presumptions. I’m talking about whether human beings of any gender were involved in the writing and typesetting of this headline. Or indeed the article below it. Or, for that matter, every other article on every other page. In other words, whether this is evidence that News Corp has become an early adopter of AI editorial in much the same way that fifteen years ago its founder was the first proprietor to use paywalls. We shall see. Or then again, perhaps we shall not. Perhaps the AI responsible has already learned from that mistake and will never make it again.

In the meantime, it’s one thing to cock up a headline that will be read for a day. But it’s quite another thing to cock up a headstone that will be misread for centuries. Most of Pope Francis’s obituaries were careful to tell us what a humble man he was and how anxious he was that his departure from this world would be accompanied by as little fanfare as possible, and specifically, how simple he wanted the engraving on his tomb to be. We must assume, then, that he never got around to signing off the artwork for that engraving, and that far from being caused by the malfunctions of centuries-old Vatican plumbing, the faint rumbling sound which some visitors to the tomb have reported hearing are actually the sound of the late pope turning in his grave. Or perhaps that should be kerning in his grave. Because this is what is carved into the slab of rich Carrera marble on top of it:

FR  A  NCISCVS

Not everybody knows that the adjustment of the space between characters in a piece of type is called kerning. But everyone can see when it’s been done badly. And what was done to Francis’s tomb looks more like the work of the average British dentist than the finest Italian stonemason. It is probably the adman in me that gets so angry when I see this sort of blunder.

Nothing makes an old copywriter’s blood boil faster than seeing the award-winning slogan it took six hours, three bottles of chardonnay and two packs of Winfield to think up being rendered unreadable by sloppy typography. That’s why, in the analog world, when we found good typographers we treasured them the way top golfers treasures their caddies. And we trusted their opinions. The best typographer I ever worked with happened to be Asian, so in an era when it wouldn’t have gotten you fired, everyone in the agency called him Thai-po.

The fact that English wasn’t his first language made his mastery of its alphabet, and how people respond to it, even more impressive. ‘Typography speaks to you before you read it,’ he once said to me, after dismissing a particular font I had suggested. ‘And if what it says to you is different from what you read, it’s bad typography.’  I suspect it’ll be a while before ChatGPT can give you advice as good as that.