Would YOU Make a Good 'Manger'? (standard:Satire, 340 words)
Author: Michael Gates	Added: Jul 17 2012	Views/Reads: 6453/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Thoughts on typos. Those little slips of the mind or the typing fingers are easy to spot -- as long as they are made by other people.

I spend a lot of time, both in my day job and in my occasional freelance
assignments, fixing up other people's writing -- including their 
typographical errors, or as they are popularly known, typos. I 
sometimes even, jokingly, call myself a "typo cop". These little slips 
of the mind or the typing fingers are easy for me to spot (it helps 
that I get paid to find them), provided they are made by other people. 
My own are much harder to see, because, like every other writer, I know 
what I meant to say, and so, I see "the" when reviewing my own writing, 
even if it's spelled teh. (In the copyediting trade, we call that 
particular type of error a vowel movement.) 

I guess that's what happened to a writer (and copyeditor?) for a New
York City newspaper who committed this sentence to print: 

"Perhaps most notably, 58 percent of the surveyed bosses said they
hadn't received any management training whatsoever before becoming a 
manger." 

Becoming a "manger"? Merriam-Webster defines "manger" as "a trough or
open box in a stable designed to hold feed or fodder for livestock." 
That's not how I think of any bosses I have had, though some might have 
been more effective had they heeded that calling. 

What would it mean to become a manger? Surely it wouldn't require a lot
of management training. Would it be a bad life? After all, thanks to a 
certain story in the Bible, mangers have a much more exalted place in 
Western culture than any other piece of farm equipment. Perhaps most of 
us would rather be a manger than, say, a milking machine or a manure 
spreader. It wouldn't be a difficult job, lying around in a barn while 
cows eat hay or grain off your concave abdomen. It might tickle though, 
or irritate -- cows have sandpapery tongues -- and it would surely 
become boring in a hurry. Still, I suppose there are worse ways to 
spend one's day.... 

How did I get on this subject?


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