Ask anyone on the street and he/she will tell you that the real-life character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave was named Solomon Northup. They’ll also tell you his last name wasn’t spelled Northrop or Northrup. Yesterday this fact was emphasized by yesterday’s New York Times correction about a story about Northup’s forced enslavement that was published 161 years ago, to wit: “An article on Jan. 20, 1853, recounting the story of Solomon Northup, whose memoir ‘12 Years a Slave‘ became a movie 160 years later that won the Best Picture Oscar at the 86th Academy Awards on Sunday night, misspelled his surname as Northrop. And the headline misspelled it as Northrup.” As President Kennedy reminded on 4.27.61, “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”