The British Railways Lost Property Office was the place where travelers were usually able to retrieve overcoats, umbrellas or briefcases absent-mindedly left on station benches and carriage luggage racks.
Indeed, it was quite normal in the distant, rather more honest, days of my youth for folks to turn in lost items rather than making off with them. Property that was not reclaimed was sold off to the public.
There were surprisingly large quantities of unclaimed items—enough to justify advertising the sales in newspapers and periodicals. To sophomoric minds at least, some of the advertisements made hilarious reading.
An unforgettable example read: “The British Railways Lost Property is offering for 4,000 pairs of blue corduroy trousers in assorted waist sizes from 32 inches to 44 inches.”
It conjured up visions of thousands of men of various shapes and sizes simultaneously shedding their blue corduroy trousers in trains scattered throughout the entire railway system. Aside from anything else, it raised the fascinating question of how so many men, stripped to their undershorts, managed to make it home unnoticed.
Not long after the blue corduroy trousers were disposed of, the Railways Lost Property Office offered for sale several hundred brand spanking new portable typewriters that somebody or the other had been careless enough to leave on a luggage rack.
They were being flogged off the general public at the decidedly attractive price of two pounds and ten shillings—a mere fraction of the regular cost. It was such a remarkable bargain I was tempted to buy one.
After carrying my bargain home to my rooms, I discovered the true meaning of caveat emptor, and the reason for the exceedingly modest price tag. The key board was not the standard English QWERTY. It was laid out for the convenience of some obscure foreign tongue. Attempts to touch type simply resulted in gobbledygook.
Naturally I rushed the ghastly machine back to the Lost Property Office. There, a clerk sniffily informed me all sales were final and ushered me out onto the street. And that, your Honor, is the story of how I ended up as a two-finger typist.
The trouble with being a two finger typist is that one tends to make rather more typing errors than are tolerated at secretarial school. I have always done my best to hunt them down a correct them, but, lamentably, a number usually manage to elude me—a condition that has in no way improved with the onset of macular degeneration.
My typographical mistakes drive some people absolutely crazy. I know because they’ve told me so. But I am afraid the problem is endemic. Try as I might, there seems to be no solution to it My only comfort is that typographical errors are quintessentially Christian. They have afflicted Christian writers from the very earliest days of the Church.
I can’t actually recall whether there is a spelling error in our oldest example of Christian writing: a portion of the Gospel According to St. John, which dates back to sometime between AD 90 and AD 125. It is written in Coptic and even though it is only a fragment, it wouldn’t in the least bit surprise me if it didn’t contain at least one spelling error.
Certainly, our oldest almost complete Bible is positively full of them. It is called Codex Sinaiticus because it was discovered by the 19th century German Scriptural scholar Professor Konstatin von Tischendorf at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai.
Codex is a Latin word for “book,” which Christians adopted in preference to the “scroll,” and this particular codex was copied sometime in the first half of the fourth century. Despite its venerable age, it is a perfectly horrible example of the scribal art. There are some reported 5,000 serious errors in the New Testament alone, and many thousands more in the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Indeed, according to the great 19th century British Scriptural scholar John William Burgon, the truly dreadful nature of the copying job might well explain its survival.
The margins of the book are crammed with so many corrections, the text is very difficult to read. Burgon argued that, in the end, its fourth century owners decided that using it was too much bother, so they simply put it aside and eventually forgot about it.
The huge number of scribal errors in Codex Sinaiticus possibly provides a clue to something that has divided the Eastern and Western Churches for more than a thousand years—the so-called filioque clause in the Nicean Creed.
Filioque is Latin for “and the Son.” We in the Western Church say that the Holy Spirit “proceedeth from the Father and the Son.” The Eastern Church, by contrast, says the Holy Spirit “proceedeth [solely] from the Father.”
One might be forgiven for thinking that filioque debate is quite inconsequential in God’s great scheme of things, but it is, nevertheless, an issue that still divides Eastern and Western Churches. The Eastern Church, which hosted the Council of Nicea that drew up the Creed, insists the original copy of the Creed did not include the filioque. The Western Church insists the filioque was most certainly in the copy of the Creed dispatched westwards.
Could it be that both sides are right? If the scribes at the Council of Nicea were only a quarter as bad as the scribes who produced Codex Sinaiticus, foul ups were inevitable. Judging by Codex Sinaiticus, a boo-boo such as the inclusion of the filioque, or its omission, was entirely predictable. Indeed, it is a miracle there aren’t many more differences between the Western version of the Nicean Creed and the Eastern version.
Why were Christian scribes so bad at their jobs in the fourth century Roman Empire. The answer is probably lies in the fact that Christian scribes were free, by contrast with most secular scribes who were slaves.
Secular scribes who made an unacceptable number of “typos” faced the uncongenial prospect of being shipped off to certain death in the lead mines. Christian scribes, however, were volunteers and, thus, there was no way of disciplining them.
Dr. Samuel Johnson put things in a nutshell when he observed: “Depend upon it, gentlemen. The prospect of hanging in a fortnight wonderfully concentrates the mind.”
In any event, Christianity’s rich tradition of typographical errors has stayed with us right down to the present day. Indeed, our beloved Anglican liturgy is, in part, shaped by it. For instance, there is no instruction “Let us pray” precedes the opening prayers in the Holy Communion service.
Consequently, some folks listen to these prayers standing, while others kneel. But no matter which practice they follow, each imagines himself to be strictly in the purest Anglican tradition. Actually, this liturgical eccentricity is not the product of some profound theological insight. It came into being thanks to a careless 17th century printer, who omitted to setting the word: “Priest: The Lord be with you. Answer: And with thy spirit. Priest: Let us pray.”
It was probably the same printer made a similar error after the Comfortable Words and left out the lower case “i” which appeared three times after each stanza of the Kyrie eleison. Thus:
Lord have mercy upon us. Iii
Christ have mercy upon us. iii
Lord have mercy upon us. iii
Those three little “i’s” mean repeat three times. This how the Anglican Communion comes to use its unique three-fold Kyrie eleison while the rest of the world still uses the ancient nine-fold version.
Priests used to be expected to put things right. And some of us do, indeed, invite our congregations to pray at the beginning of the Eucharist and even give the “Salutation” before the Sursam corda. But as for that long nine-fold Kyrie, most of us figure that the Holy Ghost knew what He was doing when he let the printer drop those three little “i’s.” GPH✠
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