By the time this appears in print, we hope we will have many more letters castigating us for bad grammar ("Portrait of a Pathologist," 197:1098, 1966, last sentence). After we had just commented upon grammatical accuracy, a flagrant grammatical error that suddenly turned up in our own writing elicited from us a bellow of editorial anguish.
The last sentence in the editorial should have read, "... and for whoever peers over his shoulder." How did the word get transformed into "whomever"? We promptly set about to unroll the course of events, going over all the checks and double checks to which manuscripts are subjected. The original manuscript, the galley, the proofreader's copy, the page proof, all were impeccably grammatical, with the proper "whoever" in the appropriate place. But alas, at the very last moment, just before the final printing, an "m" somehow got inserted, and all our checks and double