Dr. Victor Mair, who wrote about the
MaxPlanckForschung Cover Fiasco, points me to
another piece in
Language Log.
Dr. Mair says:
Reading the New Yorker on the train this morning, I was struck by the full-page ad following p. 17. When my eye drifted down the page a little, I had a bit of a shock.
I could immediately read the four Chinese characters on the arch over the entrance to Boston's Chinatown:
天下為公 ("All-under-Heaven Is a Commonwealth"), reading left to right. What left me disoriented is that each of the characters in the inscription was reversed. But then I realized that the entire inscription was a mirror image of what it should be. In other words, all four characters should be flipped over as a group and read from right to left.
As shown in the ad
Corrected (Note: classical Chinese is written right-to-left, hence the corrected image shows 公為下天 instead of 天下為公)While not as embarrassing as
the MaxPlanckForschung Cover Fiasco, I think that the
Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism might consider asking the advertising agency responsible for the
New Yorker slip-up to give them a partial refund.
Update: This snafu is brought to you by Connelly Partners in Boston, MA.
http://www.connellypartners.com/Go to "our work", print, MOTT, it's the third one.
(Thanks to anonymous for the tip.)
