YOU KNOW TIMES ARE TOUGH at the Philadelphia Inquirer when mistakes like this make it into headlines on section front pages. This is the headline that appeared on Thursday's Business section front page above the fold above business columnist Mike Armstrong's column. I figured that the term "ut-oh" must be some sort of business jargon I was unfamiliar with, but there was no explanation in the column. I called Armstrong to ask what "ut-oh" means and he said, "You got me. It's a typo."
A typo, of course, is what writers and copy editors call mistakes they should have caught. In the old days of hot lead presses, such mistakes were blamed on the typographers in the composing room. With today's electronic pagination, there are no middle men between the copy desk and the final printed page. Therefore the blame for this misspelling of the word "uh-oh" belongs to the copy editor who wrote the headline and the layers of proof readers who are supposed to catch such errors before they appear in print.
Presumably this copy editor was schooled by episodes of Scooby-Doo and had used an abbreviated form of Scooby's famous "rut-roh" in dog language.
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