‘Ha, ha! Caught you out,’ shouted my husband, holding a copy of The Spectator above his head and twirling beneath the hall light as I came in. He showed me a letter from a man (it is always a man) who suggested I thought noctae was the genitive of nox.
In one sense, I was bang to rights, for I had typed the phrase ius primae noctae, which is wrong. But it is interesting what is needed to make a mistake. Fatal to an error is advertence. If someone had asked me, a girl who had not had her brothers’ advantages of a classical education, what the genitive of nox was, I should have answered noctis. It is no excuse, but the termination of primae had acted as a false attraction, like a moving ball of wool to a kitten. Moreover, as I typed, I was humming that jingle from the ‘Pange Lingua’: in supreme nocte cene.
In the Magna Moralia, Aristotle (or Theophrastus) considers how we make errors. What if you spell someone’s name wrongly? Is it a matter of thought? ‘No one deliberates how he ought to write the name Archicles, because it is a settled matter how one ought to write the name Archicles. The error, then, does not arise in the thought, but in the act of writing.’ It’s what we used to call a slip of the pen, though such mistakes are far more common on keyboards.
Emails, for example, are full of errors, present, by a paradox because they would be so easy to correct. When corrections were impossible, or obtrusive, a typist might take her letter out of the machine and start again. In any case emails are informal.
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