Every member of Ed Board has done their share of copy editing (that’s proofreading for all the English majors out there), so we were rather concerned upon seeing today’s New York Times.

Right there on the front page of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper was an apparent misspelling, “U.S. Checkpoints a Deadly Gantlet”.

We thought about using this as an opportunity to point out that every paper occasionally makes mistakes, but first we looked up the word “gantlet” just in case it was a word and not a misspelling.

It was. Gantlet is an acceptable variant of gauntlet. However, Ed Board would still like to make an observation about the Times’ word choice.

Even though it wasn’t a misspelling, many people likely saw it as such. Surely not everyone is as diligent about looking things up as The Daily Campus editorial staff.

So people see this as a misspelling, and that results in them having a lowered opinion of the paper.

Likely the Times used “gantlet” instead of “gauntlet” because of space constraints, but they shouldn’t have.

Newspapers are forced to write at a level that even their least educated reader will be able to understand. That is why we’re seeing more “short” papers, like The Dallas Morning News’s offspring, Quick, and the now defunct alternative, The AM Morning Express.

These papers have shorter stories, are more graphically attractive and rarely jump stories to another page.

With sales of mainstream newspapers falling rapidly, and increased use of internet news sites like The Drudge Report, Slate and for the fake news crowd, The Onion, publishers are relying on these advertisement driven papers to boost profits.

The New York Times is a stalwart, part of the old guard. They need to make sure that people don’t misinterpret their headlines. Thus they should have used gauntlet instead of gantlet.

In any case, the damage has been done, and the people that don’t know of the synonymy of the two words will have had a good laugh at the Times’ expense.

We at The Daily Campus, promise that we will do our best not to use words that appear strange, unknown or misspelled.