MMMM # 141 -- Did a misspelling help start the Civil War?

     In the Electronic News Gathering class I teach, I tell the students that spelling is important, even in broadcast scripts that only the reporter or anchor generally see, because a) Closed Captioning duplicates the scripts (and the errors!), and b) mistakes in the spelling of names will sometimes end up being transferred to the graphics that visually identify people in clips (SOTS or Bites).

     I don't know if this is the first time this particular error has been caught in the 30 years since the historic marker was installed on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery by the Alabama Historical Association, but my sharp-eyed friend David in Florida caught it when I posted on the 150th anniversary of the start of The Civil War two weeks ago

    Note the word judgment in the last line. There's an extra "e".

     At first I wondered if perhaps the original telegram included the error, and the Association was being historically accurate, but you can read the actual wording in the Official War Records titled: The war of the rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies, on any number of web sites, including this one from Cornell University. And judgment is spelled correctly there.

    On the official website of the Alabama Historical Association, the wrong spelling is repeated.

    A quick disclaimer: I am a fairly miserable speller who constantly has to watch his own writing for errors...you can find any number of examples on the pages of this blog! But friend David sent me down the path of finding the origin of the mistake, and so it goes.

     Oh, and to make sure this horse is really DEAD DEAD DEAD, judgment is included on many lists of the most commonly misspelled words...including this posting at http://www.yourdictionary.com/

•judgment - Traditionally, the word has been spelled judgment in all forms of the English language. However, the spelling judgement (with e added) largely replaced judgment in the United Kingdom in a non-legal context. In the context of the law, however, judgment is preferred. This spelling change contrasts with other similar spelling changes made in American English, which were rejected in the UK. In the US at least, judgment is still preferred and judgement is considered incorrect by many American style guides.

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog. Suggestions for topics are always welcomed!]

MMMM #150* --- an electronic media order: You May Start The War

     I've produced a story for CBS-8 that will air this morning on CBS-8 This Morning between 6:00 and 7:00am, with a repeat tonight in the CBS-8 News at Six.

     Today is the 150th anniversary of the day the Confederate Secretary of War in Montgomery sent a message to his commander in South Carolina, giving him permission to fire on the Federal Ft. Sumter.

     He used a brand new high tech method to send his message: a telegram, the first electronic communication method in the world.

     The wording of the telegram sounds so quaint and archaic:

     Early the next morning the first shot was fired and Fort Sumter fell to the Confederacy. The American Civil War was underway.

     As I've written about on this blog before, Alabama and others Southern States have walked on eggshells trying to determine how to recognize the 150th anniversary without celebrating the war and slavery. More Americans died in the four year war than any other conflict in our history, before or since.

    The telegram was sent from a spot steps from a Montgomery slave market, and no one denies slavery was at the very least a partial cause of the war, if not the cause.   

    In the report on CBS-8, we talk with an archivist who has connections here in Alabama and there in South Carolina at Ft. Sumter too. And we were given a tour by one of the owners of the building on Montgomery's Dexter Avenue from which the telegram was sent. 

    The Winter building is up for sale now, and there are some exciting plans for a development in the coming months.

                                                                  

                                                                              (right) Owner John Bowman and Archivist Bob Bradley

(left) From inside the Winter Building.

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog, usually about more modern media. I numbered this morning's MMMM #150 in honor of the anniversary, though it is the 140th I've written in the years I've been  posting them here.]

(The anniversary is the subject of lots of news magazine stories this week)

Causes of The War

     As the 150th anniversary of the start of the U.S. Civil War is commemorated, the argument continues over just what caused it. Slavery? Northern tariffs? State's rights? Sociologist James W. Loewen has written a

column in The Washington Post that debunks, he says, some of the myths. 

    Certainly a topic of interest here in the first Capitol of The Confederacy.

     I've always wondered why states rights is mentioned so frequently, since The Confederate Constitution didn't grant the states any more rights than the U.S. Constitution.

     Also today, The Associated Press is out with a lengthy story about this year's Civil War Anniversary, but Alabama is mentioned only once, in reference to the states a vacationing family has been to during their personal Civil War Trail journey.