There's nothing like a good tpyo - I mean, a good typo - to cheer people up. Over the past few weeks, there seem to have been dozens doing the rounds, so here's a selection.
From The Guardian:
Bounty hunter Sam McKade is the new breed of hero. Tall? Undoubtedly. Handsome and chiselled? For sure. Incontinent? Erm – possibly. Author Susan Andersen was horrified to discover an unfortunate typo in the ebook edition of her new novel Baby, I'm Yours, which takes the novel out of the romance category and into something rather darker.
"I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on page 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," says Andersen. "Shifted - he SHIFTED! I just cringe when I think of the readers who have read this..."
From the comments on this article, here's a hilarious typo (if it's true).
Also from the comments, an excerpt from The Guardian's 'Corrections and Clarifications' column:
We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30.
And lastly, here's one that's been doing the rounds on Twitter (see larger version here):
I love that they printed and distributed the leaflet without realising...
12 comments:
I truly suck at proofreading my own work, so I'd imagine my writing to be fraught with mistakes. I don't think I've ever used a pornographic word in error, though... yikes!
Quite apart from anything else, surely the correct grammar would read "...shat on the ground..."?
I imagine proofreading could be enormously rewarding through the judicious placement of typos. Perhaps it's best I never go into it.
The fact that most of these would be picked up with a spellchecker, is what amazes me.
Who has thousands of take away menus printed without spellchecking it first? This might perhaps explain the Popadom/Poppadom/Papadum/Papadom situation.
Lovely typos! These made me laugh.
This post also reminded me of a clip of two lovely chaps, Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson, talking about the LHC at CERN. Richard mentions a misprint in a rather poetic attempt to describe his fascination for the LHC. Here's the clip: http://youtu.be/rXlV4NXkc8o
@Alessa: Maybe you wouldn't know if you had?!
@Anthropith: That would be fun, though you'd probably lose your job fairly quickly...
@Ben: Indeed. But I think the 'poppadom' situation is caused by the fact that there's no English equivalent of Urdu/Hindi/Gujarati characters, so they just try to spell it phonetically, and that varies depending on who's doing the spelling...
@kjrunia: Ha! And aptly, the Large Hardon Collider has been popularised by a scientist called Brian Cox.
@Ariane Indeed, he has! Brilliant. Science is so sexy.
Those are very funny, and I can totally believe that no one proofread the take away menu because the same thing happens at my place of work. My colleagues think that proofreading is synonymous with 'cursory glance' and then have the hide to blame the printer when mistakes are eventually pointed out to them. I still have a stack of business cards with a misspelled email address to prove it. At the rate I give them out, I'll be explaining it to recipients for years to come.
I love typos, especially really crude/stupid/obvious one. I'm easy to amuse like that. A columnist in Cyberpresse once made a type that turned tentacle, into testicle.
Maybe we all need some abstention from perfection to get anything done to its very end. And sometimes the misspelling opens a window to new insight, e.g. about the LHC or real good fast food deals.
@Alessa: An e-mail returned to me with the automatically generated remark that it has been blocked due to pornographic content. It turned out that the programme used in the firewall identified a word which is used in German for column and for cleavage (of any kind, from rock or wood to breast and buttock) as lewd. I just meant a column in a law text and felt completely innocent. But as Tom Lehrer once sang: "When directly viewed everything is lewd, I could tell you things about Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz, he´s a dirty old man." So don´t give up hope that you produced some spicy stuff as well - while being completely innocent, of course. And it doesn´t need a typo either. Just a lewd fantasy of the "reader".
@Graham: I haven't been given a business card in ages. I quite miss them, typos or not.
@Guillaume: Did the columnist say that octopuses have eight testicles?
@NoGodZone: I love Tom Lehrer! I thought I was the only person who still listened to him...
The Take Away Menu's still going? Wish I still lived in London.
@Ariane: Well and I thought I was the only one - but we were both wrong, we´re both not so unique in this respect (only this one, of course);-) The internet contains treasures and I fancy the people who share theirs with us all. I learned that way that I quoted incorrectly, here´s the song plus lyrics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pva35TFiBfI
77 thousand listened already!
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