Richard Lattimore, Dik Van Dyke, and the Mandela Effect

Continuing from my 202 post "'Richard' Lattimore: most misprinted name ever."

"Richard Lattimore" is a common enough mistake to merit a Wikipedia redirect.

On this same Wikipedia page, two Richards have crept into the list of references.

Amazon has five pages of results for Richard Lattimore.

The New York Times website even has an obituary for Richard Lattimore, though it looks like the original print edition was for Richmond.

I still find it hard to believe that this error could be so very prevalent. No other misprinted name even comes close in terms of frequency. I also have my own experience of having reading a dozen or so books that were very clearly by Richard Lattimore before suddenly discovering in 2011 that it had been Richmond all along. Prior to 2011, there was absolutely no question in my mind that the man's name was Richard, and I would have laughed at the suggestion that I might have just misread his name hundreds or thousands of times.

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This sort of thing is an example of the Mandela Effect -- crystal-clear memories which, judging by the evidence of the present, appear to be entirely false. The effect takes its name from the conviction, shared by a surprising number of people, that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1970s. They remember this (or remember seeing it in the news at the time) in great detail and with perfect clarity -- but most everyone else has equally clear and detailed memories of Mandela serving as president of South Africa in the 1990s and finally dying in 2013. The dismissive explanation of this is that these people's memories are of the death of Steve Biko, misremembered as Mandela -- but those who find themselves unable to doubt their memories embrace a variety of more extreme hypotheses, often involving parallel universe or "timelines." Apparently at some point they passed from the Mandela-dies-in-prison timeline into the Mandela-becomes-president timeline, somehow bringing some of their memories from the old timeline into the new one.

Sometimes, it is said, even physical traces of other timelines infiltrate this one. For example, many people remember the Lord's Prayer in the Bible saying "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." This is not what it says in the current timeline, but a trace of the original text still survives two verses down.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:

But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matt 6:12-15).

When I first discovered the Mandela Effect concept, one of the example that really struck me was the breakfast cereal Fruit Loops -- which had apparently always been called Fruit Loops even though I clearly remembered it being Froot Loops. That was years ago. Then, earlier this year, someone on 4chan announced that we were back in the "golden timeline" and that it was Froot Loops once more -- and it is! Now, apparently, it has always been Froot Loops, and Mandela Effect websites will tell you that many people incorrectly remember it being spelled Fruit, which is just the opposite of what they used to say.

So do you allow reality to gaslight you into rejecting your own crystal-clear memories, or do you insist that your memories are right even if that means rethinking the whole nature of the universe? I lean toward the former option, especially because most of the alternative memories are so easy to explain as errors. Reading an unusual name like Richmond or Berenstain as a more common one like Richard or Berenstein seems like a very natural sort of mistake. Getting Biko and Mandela mixed up, especially before the latter became president, also seems pretty easy. Even in the meta-Mandela case of Froot Loops, I think there's an explanation: confusion with another popular Mandela example, Looney Tunes, which people misremember as Toons. In one case, the "oo" spelling is correct and the standard spelling is a common error; in the other, the standard spelling is correct and the "oo" spelling is a common error. It would be very easy to misremember which is which.

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What brought this whole topic back to mind was my discovery -- today! -- that the actor Dik Van Dyke has apparently always spelled his name Dick Van Dyke. When I was a child, we watched Bye Bye Birdie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Mary Poppins, and even old reruns of The Dik Van Dyke Show -- and I very clearly remember his name being spelled Dik. I specifically remember wondering why he spelled Dick in such an unusual way and concluding that he probably did it for the same reason that John Bongiovi dropped the "h" from his name when he became Jon Bon Jovi: to emphasize the similarity of his first name to his last.

It just doesn't seem possible to me that these memories could be wrong. Misreading Richmond as Richard, and thinking nothing of it because Richard is a perfectly normal name -- that makes sense. But how could anyone misread Dick as Dik, notice how extremely strange that is, come up with a theory for why it's not Dick, and still somehow fail to realize that it actually is Dick?

I don't have any good explanation -- it would obviously be just a bit extravagant to postulate a parallel universe in which Dick Van Dyke spells his name without a "c"! -- but I think this sort of thing is worth noting.

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Note added: Writing this post made me question my own memories so much that I actually checked Google to confirm that Jon Bon Jovi was as I had remembered him. I had a sinking feeling that I was going to discover he had always been John Bon Jovi and that his first hit had always been called "C-3PO We Wish You A Merry Christmas." Fortunately, there was no cause for alarm. We're still in the golden timeline.

"Richard" Lattimore: most misprinted name ever

Back in 2011, after many years of reading works by (as I thought) the 20th-century classicist Richard Lattimore, I finally noticed that his name had actually been Richmond Lattimore all along. I posted about this at one of my old blogs, and I reproduce that post below.

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Just yesterday I was looking at the cover of one of my books and noticed something funny. It was a volume of English translations of Euripides, edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore -- only they had written his name as Richmond Lattimore, right there on the front cover! Then I looked at the back cover, and the title page, and a Sophocles book by the same editors -- and I found that, by golly, the guy's name actually was Richmond.

I read a lot of Greek literature in translation, and I must have seen Mr. Lattimore's name hundreds or even thousands of times before without ever once noticing that it wasn't Richard. They say the brain recognizes words mainly by how they begin and end (wcihh is why Esilgnh is slitl pltcefrey lbilege wehn you wtrie it lkie tihs), and I suppose the first time I encountered this particular name, my brain said something like, "R-I-C-something, ends with D -- okay, I know this one." After that, the more times I saw the name, and the more familiar it became, the more likely my brain would be to recognize it as a unit rather than actually reading it letter-by-letter and recognizing its mistake.

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This isn't the first time this has happened to me. It was only last year that I discovered, much to my surprise, that Euripides himself was not called Euripedes -- this after reading about a dozen of his plays and writing extensively about him in a notebook.

When I was a child, I was once discussing the characters in a Tintin book with my sister, and she mentioned the name Spalding. I said, "Don't you mean Spadling?" She said she was pretty sure the character's name was Spalding, but I insisted: "No, it's Spadling -- you know, like the basketball brand!" -- at which point she went and got our Spalding basketball and showed it to me. You don't forget an embarrassing experience like that. (Years later I tried to correct the same sister, then a grad student in philosophy, for saying Leibniz instead of Liebniz. I should have learned my lesson the first time.)

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I'm sure I'm not the only person who does this. Another childhood memory is of my father reading to us from The Lord of the Rings -- and always pronouncing Rohirrim as "Rohimmir" (though I can't be sure he thought it was spelled that way, I suppose). And I can't count how many times I've seen people list "Jane Austin" as a favorite author -- that is, an author whose name they must have seen written innumerable times and should be able to spell.

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Some of these mistakes are pretty easy to understand. There are 200 Austins for every Austen in the most recent U.S. Census, and Richmond is so unusual as a Christian name that I can't even calculate how much less frequent it is than Richard, the seventh-most popular name for men in my country.

"Spadling," of course, is not a normal name at all, but the -ling ending is fairly common in English, and I suppose that's what my brain thought it recognized. It made the same mistake when I read Tolkien, reading Eorlingas as Eorlings. (I was really quite shocked to discover much later that the a had been there all along.) My father's own Rohan-related misreading is harder to understand, though, since -im as a suffix for the name of a people should seem quite natural to a Bible-reader, much more so than -ir.

"Euripedes" and "Liebniz" are also hard to understand. I guess a lot of Greek names end in -edes, like Archimedes and -- well, that's the only one that comes to mind. I think I have a reasonable guess for "Liebniz," though. My pre-teen philosophical education consisted of (1) reading everything Plato ever wrote, (2) reading everything Nietzsche ever wrote, and (3) nothing else. When I first encountered another German philosopher with a prominent ni-z in his name, my brain must have decided that ie was a more appropriate vowel than ei.

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The strange thing about errors of this kind is how confident we are in them. I wasn't unsure about the names Spalding and Leibniz; I was confidently correcting people who pronounced them correctly! It's not that I was unsure of Mr. Lattimore's Christian name. If you had asked me two days ago, I would have said without hesitation, "Richard." And if you'd said, "Are you sure it isn't Richmond?" -- well, as they say, I could have sworn his name was Richard. Why? Because I'd seen his name so very many times, and every single time I saw it as Richard.

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(Rereading this now, it occurs to me that "Richard" Lattimore probably counts as an instance of the so-called Mandela Effect -- that the same sort of mechanism must be behind some people's subjective certainty that the Berenstain Bears used to be the Berenstein Bears, or that the Fruit of the Loom logo used to feature a cornucopia.)

The Lattimore error was brought back to my attention recently when a commenter at the Junior Ganymede mentioned that Lawrence Auster had recommended "Richard" Lattimore's translation of the Iliad. (The error was the commenter's, not Auster's.) This made me wonder just how common a mistake this is.

Extremely common, it turns out.

Using Google Ngram Viewer, I searched for the two strings "David Grene and Richmond Lattimore" and "David Grene and Richard Lattimore." (Grene and Lattimore were the coeditors of a popular collection of Greek tragedies in translation. My reason for including Grene's name in the search string was to ensure that all the Richards I picked up were in fact errors for Richmond. There have surely been real people named Richard Lattimore, but I'm fairly confident none of them ever collaborated with David Grene.) You can see the Ngram results here. The chart below shows, for selected years from 1959 (when The Complete Greek Tragedies was published) to 2019, what percentage of the hits were for Richard rather than Richmond.

As you can see, in recent decades, an astonishing 20% of published references to Grene and Lattimore -- one in five! -- have mistakenly called the latter author "Richard." Keep in mind that we're using data from Google Books -- professionally published books, not the Internet.

For comparison, hits for "Jane Austen's Emma" outnumber "Jane Austin's Emma" 95 to 1. The other errors mentioned in my post above -- Euripedes, Liebniz, etc. -- also show an incidence rate of about 1%. (Although Lattimore's collaborator, David Grene, also had the sort of name that might often be misspelled, only about 10% of references mistakenly call him "Greene.")

"Richard" Lattimore is, by a remarkably wide margin, the most frequently misprinted name I have been able to find.