There Are Exactly Two Mistakes In Infinite Jest

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TL;DR

A 2011 DFW Words post arguing that the settled text of Infinite Jest contains exactly two genuine errors — the "Scorcese" misspelling on page 393 (spelled correctly on page 944) and a subject-verb slip on page 95 ("Michael Pemulis … clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie…") — a remarkably small count for a book of "almost half a million words, or roughly twice the size of Ulysses" that was deliberately seeded with "dozens, possibly hundreds, of intentional solecisms". The post is the community's reference statement of the genuine-errata-versus-intentional-solecism distinction, and its postscripts log three further textual niggles: two layout-wrecking triple line breaks falling at page ends (unfixable without disturbing the pagination preserved since the first edition), the reportedly wrong math in endnote 123, and a mis-placed end-of-line hyphen in "kertwang" on page 512. Both named errors persist in the archive's print copy.

Key claims

The editing gauntlet: "The editing process for Infinite Jest was very rigorous" — multiple drafts, multiple Pietsch line-edits, and the book "was also gone over by two copyeditors and at least one of Wallace's family members before publication" (the process discussed in Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself).
Why editing it was hard: "The inclusion of dozens, possibly hundreds, of intentional solecisms made the book more difficult to edit than a conventional novel. There are also made-up terms, idiosyncratic back-formations, and new adjectival and adverbial constructions."
The count: given the length ("almost half a million words, or roughly twice the size of Ulysses"), "it is remarkable that there are only two errors in the final book."
Error one (p. 393): "On page 393, Martin Scorsese's name is misspelled "Scorcese."" — a common misspelling in the wild, made conspicuous because "the name is spelled correctly later in the book on page 944."
Error two (p. 95): "The second error is a subject-verb agreement problem": Pemulis, "who can stand about ten seconds of communal silence tops," "clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie up and back into the sink behind him" — "clear" for "clears."
The layout postscript: "There are also at least two instances of the triple line break between sections coming at the end of a page and wreaking havoc" on the next page's layout — understandable to leave unfixed, since fixing them would disturb "the pagination they have so assiduously maintained from the 1st edition hardcover to the 10th anniversary paperback." The two named errors, by contrast, "can be fixed with minimal typographical intrusion".
The math postscript: "Apparently some of the math stuff in endnote 123 is wrong," offered secondhand — the author disclaims the calculus.
The kertwang postscript: if "kertwang" is onomatopoeic (ker-twang), then "the end-of-the-line hyphen should be moved back one letter on page 512," which as printed implies "kert-wang."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The text's ungrammaticalities are overwhelmingly deliberate — the genuine errata reduce to two

Crux: intentional-errors
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [secondary] "The inclusion of dozens, possibly hundreds, of intentional solecisms made the book more difficult to edit than a conventional novel" — the solecism layer asserted as design, against which exactly two slips ("Scorcese" p. 393; "clear his throat" p. 95) count as real errors. [post body]
- [text] The internal control for error one: "the name is spelled correctly later in the book on page 944" — inconsistency, not policy. [post body]
Notes: The two-errors claim is the author's census, made before the 2016 20th-anniversary re-proofing (this same blog's 2016-03-23 post lists many more unintentional errors caught by Little, Brown's editors — the census below revises its own headline; see Cross-references). Read the claim as a census of conspicuous errors in the settled 1996-2006 text, not as final.

THEORY: Some of the endnote-123 Eschaton math is wrong

Crux: eschaton-math-error
Stance: mentions
Evidence:
- [secondary] "Apparently some of the math stuff in endnote 123 is wrong" — reported secondhand, with the author's own disclaimer that he cannot verify the calculus. [Pps postscript]
Notes: No position taken on deliberateness — whether the endnote's math is a deliberate character error or a slip is exactly the question this sighting leaves open; counted for the sighting census only.

Themes

Editing and production history (the multi-layer edit gauntlet); intentional error as style (solecisms, back-formations, coinages); textual stability (the pagination preserved across editions and what it forbids fixing); errata culture in the fan community.

Cross-references

dfwwords-galleys-vs-first-printing — the same blog's 2016 collation of the galley→hardcover layer upstream of these residual errors; its pagination-stability observation matches this post's.
The blog's 2016-03-23 post on the 20th-anniversary edition's corrections (acquired, in the drafting queue) — the direct sequel that supersedes the two-errors census and reports which of these items were fixed.
The questions of the novel's deliberate errors and of the Eschaton endnote's math — this post is an early, widely-pointed-to community statement of both.
burn-ij-readers-guide — the scholarly companion's treatment of the novel's deliberate idiolect.
Scene anchors: scene 032 (the Pemulis loogie sentence, pp. 95-97), scene 083 (the "Scorcese" page, pp. 391-394), scene 179 (the correct "Scorsese," pp. 941-958), endnote n123 (the Eschaton math, p. 1023 ff.).

Accuracy notes

The post's "exactly two" is a 2011 count the blog itself outgrew: its 2016 follow-up reports many more errors found and fixed in the anniversary edition. Read this piece as the 2011 state of knowledge.

Notable passages

"The inclusion of dozens, possibly hundreds, of intentional solecisms made the book more difficult to edit than a conventional novel."
"On page 393, Martin Scorsese's name is misspelled "Scorcese.""
The p. 95 sentence as printed: Pemulis "clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie up and back into the sink behind him."
On the unfixable line breaks: fixing them "would totally screw up the pagination they have so assiduously maintained from the 1st edition hardcover to the 10th anniversary paperback."