Typos | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Typos’ Category

Bad history

July 20, 2025

A while back (7/10, to be exact), two Sacred Harp singers came by my house to pick up the printer’s plate for SH99 Gospel Trumpet in the edition we’ve been singing from for 34 years (a wonderful object that I was giving away to reduce my household belongings dramatically), and like the bright-eyed Mariner ensnaring the wedding guest trapped on his stone (who cannot choose but hear), I engaged them in an hour or so of animated chat, to relieve my loneliness, after which we sang three songs from that Sacred Harp.

In e-mail afterwards, thanking them for their friendship and forbearance, I asked them a strange question:

While you were with me, did you notice anything odd about one of my hands (my right hand, specifically)? Or about how I used my right arm?

One replied:

we both noticed several fingers were bent. I assumed this was from arthritis, so if there’s more of a story I don’t know it or I’ve forgotten.

I then told them a story that I was convinced I’d posted about, on Language Log or this blog, but apparently not, so now I’m now telling it to you too.

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Posted in Errors, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Music, My life, Poetry, Typos | 2 Comments »

The anole of Palo Alto

October 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate October, aka Halloween; by the pricking of my fingers, something wicked this way lingers

Specifically, my fingers pricked out the name Anold for Arnold a little while ago, as they do with regrettable regularity (Gorgo finger not work right), but this time it was in a link on Facebook to this blog, so not self-correcting. But George V. Reilly caught the error and pointed it out to me, so that I could fix it. And then today, I had an inspiration, which I posted as a response (somewhat revised here) to George:

— AMZ > GVR: It has occurred to me to take up Anold the anold as another identity. The anold is a brightly colored arboreal lizard — a type of anole — in its rare and precious Swiss variant. Characterized by its curiosity (in several senses — “Look, Bruce, what a curious lizard!”) and its remarkable, um, snout.

This is the anold’s organ sometimes known jocularly as a Swiss nose. All noses are phallic, but some are considerably more phallic than others. (A lexical note on the noun snout, from NOAD: ‘the projecting nose and mouth of an animal, especially a mammal’.)

Meanwhile, while noses and snouts are phallic symbols, lizards (and dinosaurs and dragons) as wholes are much more impressively so. From GDoS on the noun lizard:

7 (Aus./US) the penis [1st cite 1969], with phrases meaning ‘to urinate’: bleed / drain / flog / squeeze the lizard; and phrases meaning ‘to masturbate’: bleed / gallop / pet the lizard and choke / stroke / whip one’s lizard

So now we’re deep into phallicity. Well, it’s my blog. Phallicity happens.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Language and the law, Lexical semantics, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Switzerland and Swiss things, Typos | 3 Comments »

Misplaced geminates

October 21, 2024

A new low-water mark in my erroneous ways: my 10/19/24 posting “striking language” actually appeared on this blog with a, um, striking typo in its third word, the surname of my old friend and colleague Ellen Kaisse (as I type it now, letter by letter, very slowly, so as to get it right on the first try; my rough drafts are veritable forests of typos, the product of seriously disabled fingers working at the speed of my thoughts). What my readers saw when this posting first appeared:

From Ellen Kaiise in e-mail to me

One of my typo specialties, the misplaced geminate (more on misplaced gemination below). What’s new about this example is that I failed to notice it through at least five passes of editing. And just now, when I looked at the stretch of text above, I had a moment when I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Presumably because the spelling wouldn’t affect the pronunciation in English: Kaise, Kaisse, Kaiise, Kaiisse, they’d all be pronounced /kes/. Compare this to the examples gogling, goggling, googling, googgling; in real life, again from my hand, the second of these occurred as a typo for the third, and the first two would be pronounced differently from the last two, so the error leaps out from the page.

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Posted in Errors, Language production, Spelling, Typos | 2 Comments »

From the annals of error: the spelling ATMIDDEDLY

July 21, 2024

— For Vicki Fromkin, may her memory never grow less

ATMIDDEDLY for ADMITTEDLY, in my typing up a posting a couple of days ago. Which is, first of all, an (inadvertent) exchange of the consonant letters D and T. And then involves maintaining the positions for single vs. doubled consonant letters, in the frame

Aℒ₁MIℒ₂ℒ₂EDLY (where ℒ_i is a variable over letters)

A complex error that highlights the kind of mental planning that goes on in writing or typing text: I had to choose the two letters ℒ₁ and ℒ₂ (and get them in the right order); and at the same time choose which one of them is single and which doubled. (For a refreshing change from some of the other spelling errors I’ve looked at recently, this one has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the positions of the keys on the QWERTY keyboard.)

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Posted in Errors, Language production, Psycholinguistics, Spelling, Typos | 4 Comments »

Annals of error: the carptenters of Southwest Ohio

August 18, 2023

A typo in writing — CARPTENTER, with an anticipation of the T in CARPENTER — which was then not caught by a proofreader, so that it got published looking like CARP-TENTER ‘someone or something for tenting carp’, but written solid. Exposed by Michael Palmer on Facebook on 8/15. The published display, with the beginning of the accompanying news article:

US Senator Sherrod Brown August 15 at 11:09 AM: Today our Butch Lewis Act saved the pensions of 5,400 carpenters in Southwest Ohio, restoring full benefits with NO cuts. When work has dignity, workers can take comfort that the pensions they’ve earned over a lifetime will be there for them when they retire

And then, of course, the playful Facebook comments, starting with Michael Palmer’s initial salvo:

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Posted in Compounds, Errors, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Punctuation, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Typos | Leave a Comment »

Ask AZ: fat-fingered typos

June 26, 2022

In response to my posting yesterday on “Thing sliced ham” — “thing sliced [in English muffin topped with thing sliced ham] looks like a nice example of a pure typo, an error in hitting the right keys on a keyboard” — Mike Pope asks on Facebook today:

MP > AZ: To what extent does your understanding / explanation of typos overlap with the verb to fat-finger as used in tech (and possibly elsewhere)?

And my reply begins:

AZ > MP: As a largely tech-ignorant person, I wasn’t familiar with the usage, but, yes, another species of typo.

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Posted in Errors, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Typos | 2 Comments »

Thing sliced ham

June 25, 2022

On Facebook yesterday, Stewart Kramer reported from Grandma’s Restaurant in Oceanside CA (way down south, between L.A. and San Diego):

(#1) [SK:] Thing sliced ham? Thing as in Addams family, Fantastic Four, or Cat in the Hat? None of those seem likely ham slicers, except Green Eggs and Ham. The food was good, anyway.

For entertainment, SK jumps right in with a few fictional characters named Thing, knowing full well that they’re entirely, preposterously, irrelevant. Then, commenters chose to lump thing sliced together with “spelling mistakes” that are misapprehensions about how some words are conventionally spelled, surely not what’s going on when a writer is aiming for thin sliced. Instead, thing sliced looks like a nice example of a pure typo, an error in hitting the right keys on a keyboard.

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Posted in Books, Errors, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Spelling, Typos | 2 Comments »

On the error watch

March 9, 2022

I’ll start with straightforward typos, where it’s getting the fingers to hit the intended keys that’s at issue, and then work out from there. From Greg Morrow on Facebook earlier today (exchanges lightly edited):

GM: My Dad’s got the 9-inch double-serrated Wüsthof bread knife and it is sweet. I don’t cover it exactly, I just want one exactly like it.

AZ > GM: Entirely beside your point, but I don’t cover it exactly is a beautiful example of a keyboard typo: cover for covet because R is next to T.

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Posted in Errors, Typos, Word retrieval errors | 1 Comment »

The bristly brute

February 24, 2021

On Reddit on 2/22, posted by u/Tom7454:

“On the anniversary of Arthur Schopenhauer’s birth, David Bather Woods, a Schopenhauer expert at the University of Warwick, recommends five books on Schopenhauser.”

The typo was quoted on Facebook on 2/22 by Wendy Thrash, who explained the intervention of Schopenhauser:

“Because nobody wants to read about Schopenhauer.”

The pointer is to Five Books, a site with book recommendations from authorities; each recommendation is for five books on a specific subject, in this case David Bather Woods on Arthur Schopenhauer: