Let’s do a brain-building exercise.
Remember how Highlights magazine would run puzzles where your main objective was to spot what’s off? They’d give you, say, a scene of a beach with the directions, “Spot the five things that are wrong in this picture.” Sometimes it would be obvious (that palm tree has pizza slices instead of leaves!), but other times it would be a little tougher to track down (that lifeguard’s goggles are missing a lens!). Sometimes they’d really stump you with one of the details, and you’d have to wait until they printed the answers in the next issue to figure out what you had missed.
I bring all of this up because the Washington Post’s Express free daily paper did a tweet this morning that is essentially one of those puzzles. Two things are wrong with it, and one of them might be easier to spot than the other:
Can you detect the problems? One is spelling-related, so you might notice it off the bat. But the other is semiotics-related and may take a second or two. Pause to consider the tweet for as long as you’d like, because I’m about to solve the puzzle for you.
Ready?
It’s : 1) “today’a” and, 2) the male gender symbol in an illustration about the women’s march on Washington. One is what happens when you’re about to leave the office and just need to schedule one more tweet really quickly, the other is what happens when you are an illustrator and make a mistake and then none of your editors notice the mistake and it gets printed onto a bunch of newspapers.
The paper has since deleted the original tweet and shared new cover art with the announcement that they are “very embarrassed,” but tbh I am thankful. That was a fun brain exercise. Keep us on our toes, Express.
