Homophones

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 09:58:23 +0100, neil <neil at TYPOG.CO.UK> wrote:

>I suppose this could actually be true:
>
>'A correspondent who doesn't make these things up writes: "My sister tells
>me that in a front-page report in the International Herald Tribune about the
>Pope's lying-in-state, he is described as lying with a great silver crow's
>ear on his chest."
>This kind of thing often happened, particularly in the Guardian, in days
>when stories had to be phoned through to copy-takers, which is how we came
>to review a work called Lazy Luminations, by Britten, but I had not thought
>it still happened today.'
>--Smallweed, 'The Guardian', 9 April 2005, 21

It's true, though the wording was a little different.  Here's how it still
appears on the online Herald Tribune:

-----
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/03/news/pontiff.html
Tucked under his left arm was the silver staff, called the crow's ear,
that he had carried in public.
-----

The article first appeared in the New York Times.  In the online edition
of the Times they corrected it to "crosier":

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/international/europe/03cnd-rome.html

But Google's cache still shows "crow's ear":

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:nytimes.com+crow's-ear


--Ben Zimmer