If You Think This is a Correction

...then you're an idiot.

Recall my article in the November 1 issue of mathNEWS entitled, "mathNEWS Referenced in Complaint to Iron Warrior."

You laugh. You think, "Yeah, that was the article where Klotz was making fun of their use of italics and then screwed up his own italics in the writing of 'mathNEWS' in his signature line." Hell, when I first saw it I almost suffered a heart stoppage. (This problem only appeared in the print edition, by the way.)

I have a justification for the formatting, however. Yes, the text looks funny, but really, the italics are printed correctly. That whole little post script under my signature was written in italics. The word "math" is written as italic in mathNEWS. What do you do if you want to express italics within italics? You print the text as non-italic. For example, let's say I am talking about the Titanic within a block of italics. Then when I say that a certain movie about the Titanic sucks, if the name of the boat is printed normally, it should be interpreted an italic within those italics.

Confused yet?

So anyway, you shouldn't interpret the formatting literally — mathNEWS was written in a block of italics, so the formatting of the words math and NEWS was inverted. So if you think that I should issue a correction, think again.

Then again, this could be another one of my ploys to fool Iron Warrior into thinking that we write mathNEWS differently all the time. You just never know...

Aaron Klotz
mathNEWS Guru of Italics