"Joshua Lionel Callen"

[ADCX Rob]

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=79500

How do they come up with this stuff?

Rob

[Dr. John]

At least they spelled "Lionel" right.

[pbjwilson]

Wow, thats bad. And its Atchison not Acheson. My 5th Grader knows better than that.

[Dave Farquhar]

The writer of the story wasn't a train guy. In my days writing for newspapers I flubbed up a few names here and there ("Mailes" became "Miles," and, in the worst case, "Tim" became "Kim"). You're talking to people, you write things down furiously to try to keep up, meaning to verify spellings later, and, well, sometimes you forget to verify one or two.

The page editor and copy editor are supposed to catch these things, but they in most cases know even less than the writer did (at least the writer of the story spent a couple of hours talking to train guys to get the story), so when "Callen" should be "Cohen," there's virtually no chance the error will be caught.

But at least the hobby got a little press....

[sulafool]

And that's "Cowen", not "Cohen"  (I know, he changed it from Cohen but that was a very long time ago)

[Anonymous]

 IMHO, the answer is that time passes and a younger generation doesn't have the perspective or historical reference unless it does some homework.  Probably very few younger writers today would know that the family's name originally was Cohen but that it was better, for 19th and early 20th century business relations, to spell it as Cowen.

Several years back, an author in CTT made a reference to telegraphy but it got into print as 'calligraphy'!