The moral of the story

Here's a good story for you: Borius Goldovsky, the pianist and conductor, was once leading a rather tentative pupil through a Brahms capriccio that's apparently often used as a instructional piece. After she played a certain note midway through the composition, he stopped her, and told her to correct her mistake. She, however, pointed to the score, and said that she’d played what was written. Goldovsky, dubious, checked the score, only to find that indeed she had – but that there was an apparent misprint in the music. Later, curious about the source of the printing mistake, Goldovsky eventually looked up other editions of the score, and found that every one of them contained that same misprint, substituting a G-natural for a G-sharp. While widespread, though, the error had apparently never caused problems in live performances, as professional pianists had simply inferred from the local context that the intended note was a G-sharp. In other words, professionals looked through the error, not even noticing it; it took an amateur to actually take the mistake at face value.

If I were Malcolm Gladwell, I'd likely work this little (but true! I promise) anecdote into my latest top-of-the-list tapestry of socio- and psychological observations. I'm not, though - the hair I've got left is less muppet-like, for one thing, and I'm not nearly as big on the public speaking circuit as he is - so I'll simply massage it into a simple parental truism. It may take a village to raise a child, but it can take a child to point to the fallacies in our accustomed logic. Why is the sky blue? they ask, and we wonder at how rarely we actually look at the vault above us. Or, long before they can even ask questions, they voraciously stuff paper receipts into their mouths. And us? We take the receipt, and throw it out, and neither look at nor taste it. We look through the thing, for years, until a tiny, clumsy pair of hands shows us what it really is.