“If it’s fagged, then smart!” This wisdom from the Bavarian hinterland wants to tell us: If something goes wrong, then it goes right. Who would know this better than 85-year-old Anton Gschwendtner from the Mühldorf district, a man who has traveled all over the world, and not infrequently has gagged along the way. Toni from Gschwendt, as he is called at home, worked in the steel trade. He often had to negotiate with cunning powerful people, with communist concrete heads as well as with the smart industrial bosses of the West.
In retirement, Toni from Gschwendt was a student at the Munich Institute for Bavarian History, where the friendly man soon became an indispensable helper and advisor. Now he and his wife Gisela have decided to support the facility with a foundation, a noble act that was also recognized in the SZ. However, a small letter fell into the caption. The name Gschwendtner became Geschwendtner, but the person concerned took this with humor: “I look out of the newspaper and my name is spelled wrong.”
Small typographical errors are a central plague in journalism. The politician’s name that was most often misspelled was certainly that of Minister Hans Zehetmair. At that time, journalists still tended to write down names by ear, and the ending -mair masterfully became -maier, -meier, -meir, -mayer, etc. Extreme caution is also required when it comes to titles. In a Lower Bavarian newspaper, a very secular local councilor has just been promoted to spiritual councilor in a caption.
The Instagram page “Pearls of Local Journalism” documents everything that goes wrong linguistically. There you find out, for example, that a newspaper managed to present the footballer’s name Timpanaro as Timpanero, Timparano and Timperano in just a few lines. It is well known that in reports from the shooting world, shooting evenings tend to turn into shitty evenings.
The misery of the unintentional vowel shift is concentrated most originally in the correction of an Upper Bavarian paper that a letter writer pointed out. A singer gave an acclaimed performance in the town hall, but the euphoric criticism had a flaw. The final sentence should have been: “We hope that the popular singer comes back soon.” Unfortunately it became: “We hope that the obese Singer will be back soon.” The correction went wrong again: “We hope that the popular mammal will be back soon.” Total indignation, hence another correction: “We hope that the popular singer will soon comes down.”