To err is human. Or it used to be, before we outsourced the job to tech

As William Butler Yeats once said, it’s the little things that trip you up. Or he might as well have done, since it seems to be open season on the unfortunate theosophist and monkey gland consumer, at least as far as the people who operate the Dublin Marathon are concerned.

Marathon organisers were first embarrassed in September when it was pointed out that the saccharine doggerel “There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t met yet”, which they had ascribed to Yeats on the back of this year’s medal actually had nothing to do with him. Susan O’Keeffe of the Yeats Society was being unnecessarily polite when she said there was “no evidence” the poet had ever written or uttered the phrase and was surprisingly sanguine about the whole thing. “It’s a sign of Yeats’s global importance – only the great writers, songwriters, poets, philosophers are misquoted,” she said.

Diarmaid Ferriter was having no truck with such amiable, postmodern piffle. “That there has been such a blasé dismissal of the error is a worrying reminder of the contemporary casualness about truth, evidence and accuracy and it is not something that should be shrugged off,” the historian thundered in The Irish Times.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me, said Oscar Wilde. However, if you’re in the words business, there are few things that can make your stomach lurch as horribly as a big mistake in print

Understandably keen not to melt down 20,000 medals, and mindful perhaps of Samuel Beckett’s dictum that love means never having to say you’re sorry, the marathon men forged ahead towards their big day on October 29th. Last week they revealed the reverse side of the medal, which bears the inscription: “One of Ireland’s famous literary sons and its foremost poet, this commemorates his 1923 Noble [sic] Prize win.”

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I am reliably informed it can take several hours to run a marathon, and an awful lot more effort to prepare for one. How, then, do two such embarrassing howlers, which could have been caught by the application of a far, far smaller amount of time and effort, get through?

This is dangerous ground for the modern journalist. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and there is widespread and rightful public disgruntlement with slipping standards of copy editing in newspapers and other media.

[ It’s not Yeats on the Dublin Marathon medal. It’s Marge Simpson. And you can quote me on that ]

“We pride ourselves on our high event standards,” Irish Life Dublin Marathon posted on Monday. “We have fallen below those standards in the medal design for 2023. We missed the typo on the proofing. We will putting [sic, again] in place a more robust sign-off process for 2024. We are also looking into a new approach to our medal design.”

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me, said Oscar Wilde. However, if you’re in the words business, there are few things that can make your stomach lurch as horribly as a big mistake in print. As the written word migrates definitively from physical artefacts such as paper or metal towards digital, everything becomes – in theory at least – fixable later. Traditional gatekeeping stages in the production process are stripped away in the name of budgetary efficiency.

Despite its penchant for banality and tendency to make stuff up, one thing you can say in ChatGPT’s favour is that its sentence construction is always impeccable

The best defence against stupid mistakes is eyeballs, but digital publishing reduces the number of those dramatically. And the fact that a bad typo on a screen can be quickly corrected means the stakes become lower, the embarrassment less acute and the incentives to maintain standards weaker. Software adds to a false sense of security by promising to find errors (although neither spelling nor grammar checks would have picked up the two Dublin marathon mistakes).

We are currently experiencing a further revolution in word processing. Software packages increasingly offer sophisticated tools (style tips, predictive text) to writers. These are about to be turbo-charged by the next wave of AI applications. Despite its penchant for banality and tendency to make stuff up, one thing you can say in ChatGPT’s favour is that its sentence construction is always impeccable. Meanwhile, an educational system that encourages creative expression over linguistic precision effectively outsources the latter to non-human actors. All of this feeds back down through the system so that a handful of words on a mass-produced piece of metal don’t get checked properly.

Language is protean and malleable, despite the best efforts of linguistic pedants. But the Nobel Prize is not the Noble Prize. And Yeats didn’t write that absurd quote. There is something strange going on when a culture which, measured by academic qualifications, is supposedly more educated than ever before, can let such egregious errors slip through. Diarmaid Ferriter is not wrong to fear that all of this inevitably leads to a devaluing of evidence-based empirical truth and a dangerous over-reliance on digital tools to compensate for human error. As James Joyce so memorably noted, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. That’s what gets results.