Archive for the ‘Typos’ Category
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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:
(#1)
Which inspired me to light verse:
Schopenhauser
Was a schnauzer
A bristly brute that
Played the flute
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Posted in Books, Errors, Language and animals, Language of sex, Language play, Philosophy, Poetic form, Typos | 2 Comments »
February 2, 2019
The author of the little — 67-page — guidebook The Old Editor Says: Maxims for Writing and Editing (first published in 2013), the old-school newspaper editor John E. McIntyre, writing as a curmudgeonly, sometimes imperious, character of the same name, as seen on the book’s front cover:
(#1) The name of this image file is McIntyreOldEdtor.jpg; that fact will eventually become significant
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Posted in Books, Errors, Typos, Usage advice, Usage attitudes, Writing | 1 Comment »
January 28, 2019
Tom Gauld’s cover art “Winter Garden” in the February 4th New Yorker:
(#1)
A lush indoor garden, in part representing a spring garden outside (narcissus, tulips), in part a garden fantasy (with huge trees, a parrot, a hummingbird).
Gauld — noted for his science-oriented cartoons and his goofily bookish ones — is an old friend on this blog (his Page is here). Meanwhile, here in northern California we’re going through our winter garden phases outside: a succession of spring flowers (narcissus of one variety after another, starting in December; flowering fruit trees starting now; tulips getting ready to bloom) plus specifically winter-blooming plants, like camellias and cymbidium orchids.
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Posted in Errors, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Typos | Leave a Comment »
October 13, 2018
The fall special at Dan Gordon’s (on Emerson St. in Palo Alto), as it first appeared on the menu, about a month ago:
Summer Stew $16.95
smoked pork / cippolini onions / chic peas / prunes / red rice
(with the very notable spelling chic peas and with the misspelling cippolini for cipollini). But now the ingredients list reads:
smoked pork / cippolini onions / chickpeas / dehydrated plums / red rice
(with the notable dehydrated plums). Actually, all four ingredients have linguistic interest.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Conversion, Errors, Euphemism, Italian, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Pronunciation, Spelling, Subsectivity, Typos, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
January 24, 2018
(Passing references to various sexual practices, so you might want to use your judgment.)
Today’s mail labeled [SPAM:#####]:
(#1)
The ad copy is seriously non-native English, so liquid pears for liquid pearls is an unsurprising typo, though the image of a man ejaculating liquid pears — pear brandy (Poire William(s)), for instance), pear liqueur, or pear cider — has a certain kinky charm to it.
The text in the video is clean, idiomatic English, right down to liquid pearls ‘semen’.
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Posted in Errors, Figurative language, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Typos | Leave a Comment »
