On clemency

Senior year of high school, I was one of the five million people on yearbook staff. Yearbook was an elective class, and it seemed like a lot of people were loosely affiliated with it in some capacity. I don't remember what specifically I was on staff to do... I was skipping a lot those days. It was an end-of-the-day class, it was spring and graduation was nigh, I was in good with the teacher, and I just had bigger things to worry about. I did a little of this and a little of that... one thing in particular though, I remember pretty well:

I wrote up some blurbs and photo captions for the baseball team's page. Under one photo, I wrote that some baseballer was "enjoying the clement days of spring."

Fast forward to the end of the year, when yearbooks were printed and distributed. I turn to the baseball page, and find that the caption has been changed to read "...Clemente days of spring."

Apparently, rather than recognizing "clement" as a perfect fine English word, the yearbook editors decided to interpret my caption as some awkward attempt to cram in a reference to a well-known MLB player. Nice! I'm pretty sure the guy in the picture was a pitcher, too.

Today, I remembered this because I heard Roberto Clemente mentioned on PBS. I think about this incident every once in a while though, usually in the context of thinking about how much I don't miss high school.