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This Just In: Spell check

Barnicle goes 0 for 3

By Dan Kennedy

There he goes again.

In this past Sunday's Boston Globe, columnist Mike Barnicle sneers at those who are not familiar with the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, writing that "if you do not know who he is or what he has written during his life, then drop this section and go directly to the comics."

Trouble is, Barnicle misspelled McCullough's name -- repeating his feat of a week earlier, when he mangled the names of music legends Bo Diddley and Brownie McGhee, and earned a public wack from his good friend Don Imus for his lack of musical taste ("Don't Quote Me," News, April 17). (Mea culpa: in the course of tweaking Barnicle last week, I misspelled the name of battered-women's activist Stacey Kabat.)

Barnicle quotes McCullough on falling literacy rates, and somehow winds up blaming the computer and the World-Wide Web. Maybe, as Barnicle suggests, such tools have created an information glut that "can make anyone . . . mentally lazy." But apparently not using them doesn't help much, either.