Hunter Bretzius — editor of the Gaston Gazette in Gastonia, N.C. — writes today:
Today, we had a send off party for Hugh Koontz, who is retiring after copy editing for The Star (Shelby, N.C.) and The Gazette (Gastonia, N.C.) for more than nine years.
Hugh is looking forward to spending time with his family and pursuing this favorite hobby fly fishing. We had the usual swag for gifts and a cake from the local Walmart bakery.
I’m attaching a photo of how it arrived. So perfect for a copy editor!
Notice the cake decorator painstakingly wrote the text twice — once in blue and then again in red — in order to achieve a drop-shadow effect. Yet she couldn’t be bothered to spell Hugh’s name correctly!
She definitely needs a copy editor. This example takes the cake.
Here’s another photo from the same party, showing the proud retiree.
I stole this one from the Facebook feed of Gabe Whisnant, Hugh’s colleague at the Gazette.
Thanks to Hunter for sharing. And best wishes to Huge Hugh.
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I spotted a cake decorating error myself last summer at my wife’s school. It was less of a misspelling and more of a faulty word choice, though.
Did you know there’s an entire site devoted to cake decoration debacles? Find the Cake Wrecks blog here.
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You know who else needs copy editors?
Local TV news operations. Chicago’s WMAQ-TV in particular. And Harrisburg’s Fox43 TV news. And other local TV news operations. And creators of mobile apps. And Martha Stewart’s TV operation. And Baseball jersey manufacturers. And T-shirt designers. And Georgetown University. And Kansas State University. And the New York Jets, the Minnesota Vikings, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Washington Nationals (boy, do they need a copy editor). And the National Hockey League. And Fox Sports. And college athletic department ticket offices. And the Virginia general assembly. And college alumni magazines. And pharmacies. And the makers of Sudafed. And Borders bookstore. And government agencies and political candidates. And Tea Party candidates. And city and county Boards of Elections. And the state of Pennsylvania. And the U.S. Postal Service. And South African traffic cops. And road paving contractors. And the Ohio Dept. of Transportation. And billboard companies. And sign painters. And Home Depot and manufacturers of “hoodies.” And rubber stamp designers. And restaurants, breakfast joints, Chinese restaurants and cake decorators. And drive-in movie theater managers. And South Africa’s New Age and Sunday Independent newspapers. And Dublin’s Sunday Business Post. And newspapers in the U.K. And the Washington Post, the New York Times (Hey! A repeat offender!) the New York Post, Newsday, the Chicago Sun-Times (Another repeat offender!), the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat & Chronicle, the Missoula, Mont., Missoulian, the Times-Record of Denton, Md., the Amarillo (Texas) Globe News, the Waynesboro News Virginian, the Virginian-Pilot, the Green Bay Press-Gazette, the Carbondale, Ill., Southern Illinoisian, and Time magazine. And Mann’s Jeweler’s Accent magazine. And CNN and CNN Money and Fox News (and Fox News again) and German news channel N24. And Google News’ ‘bots.
I thought maybe HUGE was a direction on how large to write Best Wishes…
Reminds me of a newsroom story of yore: A city editor was retiring and he was known for his demands upon reporters for “briefs” (short news items) about all their beats to fill out some roundups. The cake was supposed to be illustrative of this comment, but for some reason the decorator drew pictures of “brief” UNDERWEAR!
PS: The letter spacing on H UGE is horrible!
> PS: The letter spacing on H UGE is horrible!
Agreed, Dennis. That Wal-Mart bakery should perhaps invest in some Kerningware.
who says the cake decorator has to be a woman?! ;)