Much Ado about NOTHING

Would YOU Make a Good Manger?

I spend a lot of time, both in my day job and in my occasional freelance assignments, fixing up other people's writing -- including their typographical errors, or as they are popularly known, typos. I sometimes even, jokingly, call myself a "typo cop". These little slips of the mind or the typing fingers are easy for me to spot (it helps that I get paid to find them), provided they are made by other people. My own are much harder to see, because, like every other writer, I know what I meant to say, and so, I see "the" when reviewing my own writing, even if it's spelled teh. (In the copyediting trade, we call that particular type of error a vowel movement.)

I guess that's what happened to a writer (and copyeditor?) for a New York City newspaper who committed this sentence to print:

"Perhaps most notably, 58 percent of the surveyed bosses said they hadn't received any management training whatsoever before becoming a manger."

Becoming a manger? Merriam-Webster defines "manger" as "a trough or open box in a stable designed to hold feed or fodder for livestock." That's not how I think of any bosses I have had, though some might have been more effective had they heeded that calling.

What would it mean to become a manger? Surely it wouldn't require a lot of management training. Would it be a bad life? After all, thanks to a certain story in the Bible, mangers have a much more exalted place in Western culture than any other piece of farm equipment. Perhaps most of us would rather be a manger than, say, a milking machine or a manure spreader. It wouldn't be a difficult job, lying around in a barn while cows eat hay or grain off your concave abdomen. It might tickle though, or irritate -- cows have sandpapery tongues -- and it would surely become boring in a hurry. Still, I suppose there are worse ways to spend one's day....

How did I get on this subject?