The calligraphers definitely have the clever responses to this prompt!
@Erica McPhee - love the splatters! And Oh what an O!
Mike - what a great idea for a collage of "uh-oh"
This bit of pedantry goes out to
@Zivio - missing you, pal!
One of my favorite things to look for in manuscripts is how scribes dealt with errors. Many scribes simply didn't care all that much if there were things we might call "errors". Spelling didn't get codified until the end of the 18th century; punctuation as we know it also didn't exist... For instance, the Book of Kells, lauded as one of the all-time artistic masterpieces of Europe, actually contains a fairly crappy text of the gospels, full of errors and omissions and redundancies. Some of them they fixed, but some dropped or repeated words or letters or mis-conjugated verbs just stayed in as is.
Still, I really like how the Book of Kells scribes added this passage they left out at the bottom of the page - they put a dotted red cross where it should go:
https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/concern/folios/j3860713xSometimes scribes would scrape the dried ink off the parchment. And in this way, parchment is superior to paper
@AnasaziWrites - you can get ALL the visible ink off, and reuse it for something else. In this miniature depicting the 12th Century writer, Marie de France, she has a quill in her right hand (writing) and a knife in her left hand (scraping):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_de_France#/media/File:Marie_de_France_1.tifBut the heavy metals in the ink would penetrate into the skins, and when you shine a UV light on it, they'll fluoresce! It's how we found the earliest extant manuscript copy of Cicero's "De re publica" - as a palimpsest, scraped off and written over with a copy of St. Augustine's exposition on the Psalms:
https://spotlight.vatlib.it/palimpsests/about/vat-lat-5757-infMaybe some of my favorite corrections are from the Saint John's Bible - check out the bee error treatment on this page from the book of Wisdom:
https://sites.up.edu/saintjohnsbible/correction-bumblebee-2015//pedantry
I'll admit that I conceptualized this picture in response to the prompt (like black cats being a bad omen), but with the secondary intention of using it for my Halloween card to my god-children!