What do you do when you want to quote something because it's important for what you have to say, but there is a mistake in the text you want to quote?
You can stick a "[sic]" in there.
That's what I was gonna do. Somebody misspelled the word "ideological". It came out as "idealogical" which was kinda funny and quite distracting.
But does sticking a sic in there make it less distracting? Not really. Just the opposite, I think. It draws attention to the error and distracts the reader from your important message.
But I wasn't thinking that way. I just looked up how to use sic properly. Then I found this example and commentary in Wikipedia:
"Professor Smith stated that 'in the Domesday Book of 1087 [sic]' the king owned more manors than any other person." The professor had given the incorrect date for Domesday Book (recte 1086) and leaving his error uncorrected followed by [sic] emphasises that the error was his. The professor has thus been somewhat ridiculed. A more diplomatic way of quoting the professor would have been to omit the date altogether whilst retaining the substance of his argument or simply to have corrected it in the knowledge that it was a "slip of the pen".
That was useful.
It's okay to make minor corrections to quoted text. Good to know.
