Typo of the Month

Think proofreading isn’t important? The people in these stories of particularly embarrassing or expensive typos might disagree.

June 2011

Many of the typos I talk about in Typo of the Month cost the businesses or individuals involved some serious money. For Google, however, typos pay — an estimated $497 million per year, in fact. “Typosquatting” involves buying domain names similar to those of other popular businesses, and in many cases, plastering the sites with Google ads. There are so many of these typosquatting websites that the revenue really adds up.

So just how often do people mistype domain names? According to Harvard researchers Ben Edelman and Tyler Moore, “If these typo domains were treated as a single website, that site would be ranked by Alexa as the 10th most popular website in the world. It would be more popular, in unique daily visitors, than Twitter.com, Myspace.com, or Amazon.com.”

Read more about Google’s adventures in typosquatting here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/18/google_typosquatting_study/.

May 2011

It’s not exactly a typo, but I couldn’t help but include this verbal mix-up in this month’s Typo of the Month: In reporting on the breaking news of Osama bin Laden’s death on Sunday, a Fox News affiliate in Washington, D.C., accidentally said that President Obama, not bin Laden, was dead. Watch the video clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMP7Ys57ha4&feature=share.

April 2011

As more and more people are relying on GPS to help them avoid unnecessary geography knowledge, this cautionary tale comes from Italy. A Swedish couple looking to relax on the scenic island of Capri accidentally entered “Carpi” into their GPS. Rather than getting an error message, though, they got directions to Carpi, an industrial town in the northern part of the country ... 400 miles away.

Unfortunately for the couple, spelling skills aren’t their only weakness — according to a spokesman for the local town hall, upon their arrival in Carpi, “they did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat.”

Read more about this typo here: http://www.eturbonews.com/10657/one-gps-typo-and-you-are-carpi-instead-capri.

March 2011

Can commas save lives? For Rachael Ray’s family, they just might. According to several sources, a teaser on the front cover of Tails magazine in October 2010 read, “Eat, Ray, Love: Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.” There’s some debate about whether this magazine cover is real or Photoshopped, but the typo’s good enough to share either way. Judge for yourself here: http://blog.timesunion.com/danielnester/rachaelraycannibalcomma/1888/.

February 2011

Hey there, typo lovers. It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and if you’re single(ish) and looking for someone with bad grammar, then Wet Seal has just the shirt for you! This “fun and trendy tunic” (http://www.wetseal.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=42539) reads, “If your single, so am I.” What could be better than a shirt that rolls glittery letters, heart shapes, and illiteracy into one?

Only this comment, which was posted below an online article about the typo:

“See, that’s the Catch-22 of child labor. If they’d been in school, they wouldn’t have made that mistake. Then again, they wouldn’t have made the shirt either.”

Unfortunately, this shirt is currently out of stock in the online store, so for the time being you’ll have to find some other way to advertise your promiscuity.

January 2011

If you’re anything like me, you love a good foreign menu typo. I found this politically incorrect gem in a restaurant in Malaysia: http://bit.ly/hoOvgX. Needless to say, I did not order the vegetarian pizza.

Happy 2011, everyone!

December 2010

According to Craig Silverman, the owner of “Regret the Error,” a website that ensures the media is never allowed to forget its mistakes, the UK newspaper The Guardian printed the following correction last year:

“... This article was amended on Tuesday 20 January 2009. In our entry on Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, we referred to a Prairie Ho Companion; we meant a Prairie Home Companion. This has been corrected.”

November 2010

What’s in a name? For Illinois gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney, quite a bit. The Green Party candidate’s name was misspelled as “Rich Whitey” in voting machines in 23 Chicago wards. The typo is of particular concern to Whitney because many of the communities affected by the error are largely black, and Whitney does not want to come off as ... well, a rich whitey.

October 2010

Remember Coolio of 1990s rap fame? Well, apparently spell-check doesn't exist in a gangsta's paradise, as evidenced by his new tattoo, which reads “Jugalo Cool.” “Juggalos” are the name for fans of Insane Clown Posse, with whom Coolio is touring.

See the tattoo here: http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/47618725.html

September 2010

One of the most profitable websites on the Internet started out as a misspelling. When Google cofounder Larry Page, then a Stanford graduate student, was brainstorming names for his new search engine, his officemate Sean Anderson suggested “googolplex,” which Page shortened to “googol.” Anderson, who likely did not win any spelling bees as a kid, searched an Internet domain name registry for the misspelling “google.com” to see if the name was taken. It wasn’t. Page registered the domain name for himself and Sergey Brin, his cofounder. Only later did the two find out that the word was misspelled, but by then it was too late.

August 2010

In February, a Chilean man lost his job over a line a fraction of a millimeter long — or rather, the lack thereof.

Gregorio Iniguez, managing director of the Chilean mint, was fired after the discovery that 1.5 million 50-peso coins had gone into circulation in 2008 that spelled the country's name “C-H-I-I-E.” According to the head franker at the mint, though, Iniguez was not the only person at fault: An entire chain of people had to approve the coin before it was put into circulation. The coins are still in circulation, though many locals are hanging on to them in hopes that their value will rise.

See the misspelled coin here: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MIMiAVFFofY/TAt7Fb3FQaI/AAAAAAAAAOk/sHzejLm9cyk/s1600/chiie.jpg

July 2010

Poor Australia. Twice now, President Barack Obama — that’s B-A-R-A-C-K — has canceled a trip to the country to deal with piddly little issues like the Gulf oil spill and health care reform. Maybe next time he’ll be a little more sensitive to Australians’ feelings; they were clearly excited to have him, or the parliament gift shop wouldn’t have gone to the effort of making 200 commemorative mugs with “Barrack Obama” printed on them.

Read more about Australia’s hurt feelings and poor spelling skills in this sulky-sounding article from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/asia_pacific/10262818.stm.

June 2010

Want to send a note of condolence to Al and Tipper on their separation? If you were quick enough this afternoon, you could have obtained a personal email address for the former vice president. When CNN.com posted an article about the couple’s separation (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/01/breaking-al-and-tipper-gore-decide-to-separate/?fbid=EpVHheoBXJz), they included a link to the email the Gores sent to friends to let them know about the separation. Though the return email address was blacked out, the link underneath was still active — in other words, if you clicked on the black bar, your preferred email client would have opened up a new email addressed to the Gores’ personal email account.

All right, it’s not exactly a typo, but it’s still probably something the reporter would have preferred to catch before posting the article — not two hours after.

May 2010

Some people just don’t learn from their mistakes. For the second season in a row, Majestic Athletic has apparently put someone who failed English class in charge of printing the uniforms for Major League Baseball.

You may remember last May’s Typo of the Month, in which two members of the Washington Nationals baseball team played the first three innings of a game wearing jerseys that read “Natinals” due to a Majestic error. One year later, another Majestic error left San Francisco Giants reserve Eugenio Velez playing in a jersey that read “San Francicso.”

Luckily, the mistake did not affect Velez’s game. According to the Associated Press, Velez was unaware of the error until a reporter called to ask him about it.

April 2010

America’s finest news source steps up to the plate once again to keep us informed about politics, the world around us, and the dangers of typos in this Onion news brief called “Defense Department typo results in U.S. attack on Ira.”

Happy April Fools’ Day, everyone.

March 2010

A car dealership in Roswell, New Mexico, decided to promote itself by sending out 50,000 scratch-off lottery cards to local residents. The grand prize of $1,000 was supposed to be awarded to one lucky recipient. Unfortunately, the marketing company that printed the cards made an error, and every person who scratched off a lottery card discovered that he or she had won the grand prize.

Needless to say, the company was not able to follow through on all this prize money. Instead, every person who presented a winning lottery card was entered into a drawing for the grand prize and given a consolation prize of a $5 Wal-Mart gift card.

Well, at least they got their name out there.

February 2010

An eBay seller decided to list a bottle of Allsopp’s Arctic Ale, brewed in 1852, that had been in his family for over fifty years. Unfortunately for him, though, he accidentally left off the second P in Allsopp’s in the auction title, making the listing difficult for potential bidders to find. The winner of the auction paid $304 for the bottle, then re-listed the ale using the correct spelling. This time, the winning bid came in at over $500,000. Although it later turned out that the winning bid was a joke, there’s no doubt that the bottle is worth thousands of dollars.

January 2010

In 2005, the U.S. Postal Service came out with a new stamp honoring the memory of singer Marian Anderson. During its production and printing, no one noticed that the singer’s first name was misspelled as “Marion” in the cancellation mark. When the stamp came out, the Postal Service held an event in the singer’s hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, to celebrate its release. Finally, at this event, someone approached postal officials and music center staff to point out the error.

So who was this person who noticed what no one else had? A nine-year-old girl.

December 2009

We’re deep into the holiday season now, which means only one thing: SUGAR! In celebration of this special time of year, let’s turn to some good old-fashioned cake wrecks ... because nothing says “I care” like a misspelled cake. http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/search/label/Creative%20Grammar

November 2009

When the city of Berkeley, California, replaced its street signs in early 2008, someone must have been eager for his or her lunch break. One street sign, as you may have guessed, was misspelled. However, the name of the street wasn’t particularly obscure, nor was the spelling a hard one. In fact, it’s probably one of the first spelling words California schoolchildren learn: California. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/02/20/BAT7V5A7I.DTL&o=0

October 2009

Wednesday was my last day proofreading for the Austin Business Journal. With the fast turnaround times required for newspaper publishing, it’s inevitable that in the fifteen months I proofread the paper, a few details must have escaped my notice. However, I can rest easy knowing that a few basic things were always correct in the editions I proofread — the name of the paper in the masthead, for example. Don’t laugh, though; this is no small feat. Just ask New Hampshire’s Valley Newss — I mean, News — who wish they could say the same. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2449342/Newspaper-misspells-name-on-front-page.html

September 2009

Tired of those pesky ... uh ... um ...

Wish there were some way to ward off ... wait, no ...

There is absolutely no professionally appropriate way to comment on this month’s typo, so let me just say: Don’t let a mistake like this happen to you. http://eye.for.ink.googlepages.com/Repellent.png

August 2009

Okay, I’ll admit: typos aren’t a matter of life or death. But for an Ohio man, a typo recently made the difference between freedom and incarceration.

In October of 2005, Calvin Eugene Wells was convicted of possessing over one hundred grams of crack cocaine, and was sentenced to ten years in prison. However, at his sentencing the jurors signed a verdict form that stated “that the amount of crack cocaine WAS in the amount exceeding ten one hundred (100) grams as charged in the indictment.”

But exactly how much is “ten one hundred (100) grams”? Wells noticed the extraneous “ten” while serving his time and eventually found a lawyer willing to argue to the Ohio Court of Appeals that the typo made it unclear how much of the drug jurors believed Wells to have possessed. Over one hundred grams? A fraction of a gram? The judges agreed that the wording was ambiguous. Wells’ conviction was downgraded from a first-degree to a fifth-degree felony, the maximum sentence for which he had already long since served.

July 2009

I went to school at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed is a small liberal arts college known for its rigorous academics and for a student body of creative, independent thinkers who are notoriously eccentric. One student group exists solely to supply the campus with communal goods such as tiny bikes to ride around campus. An annual celebration complete with music, food, and an open mic is held in appreciation of the element nitrogen. And an end-of-the-year festival always includes a glow-in-the-dark rock opera and a middle-of-the-night dropping of thousands of bouncy balls down a steep street by campus. So it should come as no surprise that time, too, passes differently at Reed: a month can feel like a year, a semester can fly by, and sometimes—every once in a while—time escapes the confines of linearity altogether: http://eye.for.ink.googlepages.com/ReedcalendarJune.jpg.

June 2009

Have you been to Washington, D.C., and stood at the entrance to the Lincoln Memorial? This majestic building has been the site of some very famous speeches, and both its location and its history are bound to get you thinking about our nation’s past, present, and euture.

That’s right: euture. Inside the memorial, Lincoln’s second inaugural address is carved into one of the walls. The carver seems to have gotten a little overeager while carving the F in the word “future,” and after making the two horizontal lines, just kept going. It would have been too costly to recarve the entire wall, so the extra line was simply filled in, but can still be seen: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3123/2608779338_ae22fa1b0b.jpg.

May 2009

In April, two members of the Washington Nationals Major League Baseball team went to bat at less than full capacity. To be specific, they were each short an O. For the first three innings of a game against the Florida Marlins, players Adam Dunn and Ryan Zimmerman wore jerseys that read “Natinals.”

The company that printed the uniforms, Majestic Athletic, claimed full responsibility for the typo, and the players were given correctly spelled jerseys to change into before the end of the game.

(The team still lost, though. Coincidence?)

April 2009

Over the last few months, we’ve seen several examples of the negative impact typos have had on businesses, businesspeople, and governmental entities. But typos can wreak havoc on interpersonal relations as well, as you'll hear in this unfortunate audio story from the Onion Radio News, called “Emoticon Typo Commits Area Woman to Second Date.” (Watch out; the sound starts playing as soon as the page is opened.) Click here to hear the story: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46989.

I hope you’re all having a great first day of April—no foolin’!

March 2009

Not even Merriam-Webster is infallible. The second edition of the New International Dictionary, printed in the 1930s, contained the word “dord,” defined as a physics and chemistry term meaning “density.” The problem with the word was not its spelling, though, nor its definition. The problem was that the word “dord” simply does not exist.

So how did a nonword make it into the dictionary? The error has been attributed to a slip of paper reading “D or d, cont./density,” sent to Merriam-Webster by its chemistry editor. The editor’s aim was to get “density” added to the list of words that can be abbreviated by the letter D, but due to the spacing of the letters on the slip, “D or d” looked like “Dord.” An editor noticed the mistake in 1939, and ended the word’s short career.

February 2009

The Texas Legislature began its 81st regular session a few weeks ago, so this seems like a good time to mention that in 2007 Arkansas passed a law containing an interesting typo. The bill was intended to raise the minimum age for marriage to eighteen but allow pregnant minors to marry with parental consent. However, an accidental “not” changed the meaning of the legislation to allow anyone under eighteen who wasn't pregnant to marry with parental consent. The legislature later repealed the law in a special session. No word on whether any parents took advantage of the intervening months to lawfully wed their infants.

January 2009

A couple of years back, Ottawa County in Michigan had to reprint 170,000 ballots not long before an election. Why? The original ballots included an embarrassing typo: the letter L was missing from the word “public.” The county paid $40,000 to correct the error.

Wishing you a successful and error-free new year.

December 2008

Recently, Swansea Council in Wales wanted to print a bilingual road sign reading “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.” They emailed their in-house translation service for the Welsh translation of the message, and got a quick response back from the translator. They had the sign printed in both languages and erected. Only later, when Welsh speakers saw the sign, did Swansea Council learn that the Welsh on the sign read, “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

Read more about the error here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7702913.stm.

November 2008

This month’s typo is not expensive or embarrassing—it’s just plain baffling. This photo, of a sign posted outside of a public restroom, was sent to me by a friend living in China: http://eye.for.ink.googlepages.com/WhatisaRuce.JPG.

“What is a ruce?” he writes. “I will tell you, that is just the Chinese word for person entering the bathroom. Why translate everything else but not that?”

(By the way, what are Luanhuawalls?)

October 2008

This year, waterfowl hunters are required by the federal government to buy and carry a stamp that lists a toll-free phone sex number.

A telephone number printed on millions of Migratory Bird Conservation and Hunting Stamps, or “duck stamps,” is intended to aid callers in ordering additional stamps. An accidental transposition in the number, however, instead directs callers to “Intimate Connections,” where they can “talk only to the girls who turn you on” for $1.99 per minute. The Fish and Wildlife Service intends to keep distributing the cards, saying that reprints would be too costly.

Read more about the unfortunate error here: http://www.startribune.com/sports/outdoors/27822694.html.

September 2008

In 1631, King Charles I ordered 1,000 copies of the Bible from printers in London. After the Bibles were delivered, however, someone noticed a typo. The accidental omission of the word “not” in the seventh commandment resulted in followers being commanded to commit adultery.

The king was furious. He fined the printers 300 pounds—an entire lifetime's wages—and ordered that the books be burned. Only eleven copies of the so-called “Wicked Bible” still exist today.

Click here for an image of the blasphemous commandment: http://www.greatsite.com/images/rarebooks/wickedbible.jpg.

August 2008

In 2006, an employee for Alitalia Airlines forgot two zeros when listing online the price of a ticket from Toronto to Larnaca, Cyprus. Oops! For twelve hours until the discovery of the mistake, lucky buyers purchased the $3900 Canadian ticket for $39 Canadian.

July 2008

In 2004, a federal judge in Philadelphia reduced a lawyer's fees by $31,500 due to excessive typos and bad writing in his filings. The lawyer, according to the New York Times, wrote in his defense, “Had the defendants not tired to paper plaintiff’s counsel to death, some type would not have occurred. Furthermore, there have been omissions by the defendants, thus they should not case stones.” Needless to say, this defense did not prove helpful for him.

You can read the full article here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE7DE133FF937A35750C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1.

June 2008

The Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan issued new currency in 2006 that misspelled the Kazakh word “bank” (same meaning as in English) as “bankh.” The misspelling appeared on so much of the new currency—80 percent of bills for two separate denominations—that officials decided not to recall the currency. Readh more hereh: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-19-kazakhstan-money_x.htm?csp=34.

(Ironically, note the misspelling of the word “Kazakhstan” in the article’s headline.)

May 2008

In 1998, the University of Wisconsin awarded almost 4,000 diplomas that misspelled the state’s name as “Wisconson.” Believe it or not, no one brought the mistake to the attention of the university until six months later. The printing company paid the monetary cost to reprint the diplomas, but I bet the school paid a much worse price.

*Correction, April 5, 2011: A 1988 University of Wisconsin graduate reported that this typo appeared on diplomas in 1988, not 1998.

Typo of the Month

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