As a world famous writer and good looking Cat, have you read my latest masterpiece – ‘Getting Out Excerpts From A Cat’s Diary’ you can get a sneak peek here www.thecatsdiary.com or better still (for me) you can buy it here Amazon.com by just copying and pasting the title of my award winning book in their search thingy.

All of which means that as you can probably imagine that as an author I have had a lot practice inserting odd and frankly erratic letters into words and I wondered if anyone else did that sort of thing as often as I seem to do!

To check this I decided to pay particular attention when reading the books of other authors, who are nearly as famous as me, and not drift off as I usually do! Guess what I found that lots of modern authors have loads of words in their books that have – how can we put this – er ‘challenging’ spellings.

I read with a smile in one of Jeremy Clarkson’s books yes that is the Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear Top Gear.com and the Sunday Times The Times.co.uk no less, that someone was ‘whinning’ when he was talking about coming first and indeed there weren’t at all displeased when they won!

What is so dreadful about these typos is that his books are a bit of a rip off and this is because they consist of articles first published in the UK’s Sunday Times.

Then they are used as Fish and Chip wrappers before being collected up and bundled into a book or 12, which means that at least one sub-editor has missed the mistyping of Mr. Clarkson and if the publishers were interested in quality (yes, I managed to type that with a straight face) they would surely have had someone proof the copy before it was turned into a paperback book wouldn’t they? Which means that two proof readers missed the typos etc.

The use of typos to confuse readers is not a new trend though old Charlie Dickens was as adept as I am with changing the order of the letters in words – I prefer the think that us geniuses do that rather than suggest that we just don’t know how to spell things.

And this is to say nothing of Will Shakespeare yet! But then it was as you may know was a common practice in merry old England (or is that ‘merrie olde’ England) in Elizabethan times or is that tymes, to do that sort of thing a lot.

Based on this I have come to the conclusion that the Elizabethans were just very bad typists, well there can’t be any other reason for the dreadful spelling in the paragraph below.

The paragraph of gibberish is taken from an account of the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots written by Henry Grey, Earl of Kent, one of the principal Commissioners at the Queen’s trial and execution:-

‘… then laye shee downe verye quietlye stretchinge out her bodye, & layinge her necke over the blocke, cryed, In manus tuas domine, &c. One of the  executioners held downe her hande[s], the other did w[i]th 2 strokes of an axe cut of her head, w[hi]che (falling of her attire) appeared verye graye & near powled [bald] … the blooddye cloathes, the blocke, & what soever els bluddye was burned, in the chimneye fyer

Just for your convenience and sanity I have translated some of the weirder words that for some reason have fallen into disuse like “powled.” But still it is nonsense even I can type better than that, and I am a Cat!

Actually I have to apologise about the image for some reason I couldn’t find a photograph of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots which was a bit of a shame or indeed a photograph of her at all, which just goes to show how good the Elizabethans were when they set about erasing someone from history.

In addition I would like to make one observation on the painting of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, she was a bit dim wasn’t she? After all even this Cat knows that you have to face the floor when kneeling over the execution block so that the man with the chopper has a fair chance!

Silly Queen!

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