A cautionary tale concerning image libraries.
On the magazine I work for, we do use photographers but we also buy some of our pictures from a popular image library for £60 a pop. Recently, to illustrate a feature about debt, we downloaded a (presumably manipulated) photograph of a mousetrap that had as its base a credit card - metaphorically showing the dangers of credit. I would love to show you the image here on the blog but that would cost me £60, so I'm afraid you'll have to use your imagination.
Anyway, we placed the credit card/mousetrap image on page and it wasn't until much later, when I was doing the final corrections, that I noticed the name on the credit card: Mr Hugh Jassdetter. Read it quickly and it sounds suspiciously like 'huge-assed debtor'. A little joke on the part of whoever originally Photoshopped the image? I think so. And one that all our proofreaders had failed to spot.
Our art guru quickly changed the name on the credit card to 'Mr Hugh Dassdetter' - which we felt was less likely to cause offence among our more sensitive readers. Another embarrassment narrowly avoided by the production desk...
6 comments:
Oh, that's funny. You should have left it alone, I think ... but I imagine you would have gotten complaints.
Being from Norway, I can't resist de-lurking to mention that I was amused by both versions of the name. In Norwegian, 'dass' means 'loo' and 'detter' means 'falls' (present tense of the verb 'fall'). So 'dassdetter' reads to me like a grammatically somewhat dodgy use of creative compounding, meaning something like 'loo-falls'... :)
Enjoyable blog you have here by the way!
Haha, that's great. At least whoever made up that name has a sense of humor! (And yeah, it's a good thing you production desk folks have eagle-eyes and good crisis avoidance instincts!)
Thanks, find - I don't think the publication in question has too many Norwegian readers! Still, I hope it brought a smile to one or two people out there.
Ridger, FCD – remember that old maxim: 'if in doubt, leave it out...'
JD, where were you when I needed you a good few years back and managed to write the following at the end of a short news story on a vehicle show: "See next week for a dull report". I thought it was funny; the author thought it was funny. The editor didn't.
And yes, on the keyboard d is right next to the f I was looking for...
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