I know there's big news in the Globe today: Edward Kennedy's death, the Globe's endorsement of circumcision.  But reading through the morning letters to the editor I came across this, and was, frankly, well, stricken...


I mean, we all expected Kennedy to die sometime soon (RIP, Teddy), and it's no surprise when newspapers endorse circumcision (hello! Jewish media conspiracy anyone?), but when a headline with a glaring grammatical error that even intermediate ESL students could catch (not to mention spell check) you have to wonder, is this a cry for help?

And for those of you who think it's just carping, a great deal of a newspaper's credibility rests on just this sort of editorial oversight, which it appears the Globe may now be outsourcing to Uzbekistan.  Especially when an error is as glaring as this one — I mean, who ever uses the past participle of strike as the present third person singular? — it forces you to ask if their fact-checking is as defective as their spell-checking. 

There is no more devastating way to discredit someone in the world of letters, after all, than "[sic]".