SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:Or more precisely: estuvo is the "estar" pretérito perfecto simple of "él/ella".
For what _underlying reason, other than "it simply isn't said that way"_ would Spanish natives avoid using that particular tense when they want to say "there was an error"?
For the underlying reason that
ser is preferred in identity clauses.
As Vijay says, a mistake is a mistake. That's its identity. It doesn't cease being a mistake simply by virtue of being corrected later. A text can contain mistakes which make it incorrect and those mistakes can be removed (hence Antea's example of
este texto está equivocado), but those mistakes remain mistakes forever.
If you want to say "There used to be an error, but it's since been removed", you could use the
pretérito imperfecto, i.e.
estaba un error. But this is an example of the use of
estar to indicate location, not identity, and is a fundamentally different case than what you're asking about.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons