Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern has been one of my favorite compilations for most of my life. It’s been a mind-expanding read for me on numerous occasions since I was fifteen.

Recently, my girlfriend and I were going reading through one of the word-play submissions by Howard Bergerson and we found an error. This self-documenting sentence does not add up (link):

“In this sentence, the word and occurs twice, the word eight occurs twice, the word four occurs twice, the word fourteen occurs four times, the word in occurs twice, the word seven occurs twice, the word the occurs fourteen times, the word this occurs twice, the word times occurs seven times, the word twice occurs eight times and the word word occurs fourteen times.”

Clearly, the word fourteen doesn’t occur four times, for example.

I couldn’t dig up an errata page for the book, so I’m posting here. Am I wrong?