The phone call Rich Evans got Monday morning wasn’t good news.
It was an employee at Brigham Young University’s The Daily Universe , where Evans is the editorial manager. There was a typo on the front page.
“It was the worst possible mistake,” Evans recalled.
The error? A caption on a photo from this weekend’s LDS General Conference stated that “Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote Saturday morning. …”
The newspaper staff retrieved as many of the 18,500 copies of the paper as possible and reprinted them with the correction. And it issued an apology to the apostles. The staff also explained how it happened: an error in spell-checking.
It started when a student misspelled the word “apostle” when writing the photo caption. When the caption was put through the editing software’s spell checker, it was flagged, and the editor accidentally clicked the first word that came up on the correct list: “apostate.” The mistake made it past two proofreaders before being sent off to the printing press.
And in case you didn’t know . . .
Apostate – A person who renounces a religion or faith.
Apostle –
1. A missionary, or leader of a mission, especially one in the early Christian Church (but see Apostle)
2. A pioneer or early advocate of a particular cause, prophet of a belief, etc.
3. A top-ranking ecclesiastical official in the Mormon (twelve-seat, hence the term) administrative council.