Friday, May 1, 2015

Anglel* (for Angel* or Angle*)

A friend has requested a favor of me that I might literally be one of the very few people on Earth capable of granting. She wants to borrow a book that I happen to own for scanning and then sending overseas to be published in a new foreign-language edition. (This book is currently out of print, unavailable online, and only held by two libraries in WorldCat.) She called me her "angel in distress." Which is really sweet, of course, and would seem to be yet another case of "conflated idiom": that is, "damsel in distress" (her) + "angel in disguise" (me). We found 18 examples of Anglel* in OhioLINK, and 361 in WorldCat. Most were typos for names like Angelika or Los Angeles, although a few of them were for titles in a children's series about math−for example, Sir Cumference and the Great Knight of Angleland (2001) by Cindy Neuschwander. Be an angel and save the day by correcting this typo in your own catalog of books today.

(Piscator Bible, Apocalypse Angel with book, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

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