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Years ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of The Hartford Courant. The letter was printed, and even used in a TV interview of a Connecticut gubernatorial candidate. It was not what I wrote, though. I accused the Courant of calumniating a candidate, and the newspaper changed the word to slander. On the face of it, one might think that the Courant was simply discounting the notion that its readers could use a dictionary.

In fact, they replaced it with the wrong word. As great newspaper man J. Jonah Jameson stated, "the word is libel". That would have been less inaccurate. In any event, it is not for them to edit reader's letters, except perhaps for obvious typographical errors.