I’ve never heard an articulated lorry pronounced ‘Sem-ee’ until this thread. Anecdotally, (to my ears) I hear the common words with ‘semi-’ as a prefix pronounced as ‘sem-ee,’ but any nonce words using it as a prefix pronounced as ‘sem-eye.’ Of course, YMMV (as well as your ears).
Two from my teaching jobs.
First, the painful one: I was reading a story written by a White boy. He drew a stick figure in a chair and wrote about “I was at hom waching TV”. The next page showed black stick figures jumping in through a window and said “THEN I WAS ATTAKT BY NIGAS but I kild them all”
My blood ran cold when I read that page. I was a first-year teacher, and I had no idea what to do: do I go to the counselor? Do I write an office referral? Do I call parents?
Eventually I figured out what to do: I taught him the correct spelling. “N-I-N-J-A-S.”
****
Years later, a child was writing about a festival she’d gone to. It was a great paragraph, but I leaned over her shoulder and whispered, “Honey, ‘funk music’ is spelled with an ‘n’, not a ‘c’.”
Maybe that’s just a particularly potent strain of the virus.
To be fair, cigarettes do stinq.
That is priceless 
no, no, it’s dire rear.
That was the standard term in Philly for two houses attached on one side. In fact I lived for 47 years in such a house in Montreal, but I’m not sure what they called it here. To me duplex means a 2 storey apartment building, one on each floor.
One of the funniest appeared in the New Yorker back in the days when they regularly used such things as column fillers (they still do them but very occasionally). Someone had written to a columnist like Ann Landers (this was not necessarily who it was) to complain about a late-night host who regularly sign off, “For [cohost] and me”, claiming it should have been “and I”. The columnist commiserated with the writer and added that grammatical standards were in decline, get used to it. I think the New Yorker printed this without comment.
The local newspaper had a long story about faith practices of Muslims. The headline at the top of the page was Muslims Prey on Fridays. This was just after 9/11.
I’ve written here about this one before. My high-school-aged daughter asked me to read over the report she’d just written on the August Wilson play Fences. Turn out that spellcheck won’t notice anything amiss if you forget to put the “n” in “fences”.
Which I think goes all the way back to Art Linkletter’s “Kids Say The Darndest Things.”
Many years ago I subbed occasionally in a local school district. At the high school there was a poster laying out the dress code. Among the prohibitions, alongside saggy pants and offensive logos, was a line stating “no mid rifts”. Beside the obvious spelling mistake I found it striking that they weren’t merely prohibiting midriff-baring clothes, but seemingly the entire part of the body.
Tangential: my oldest nephew, when he was, I don’t know, eight or so, was obsessed with ninjas (particularly in the context of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and fixated on, as he called them at the time , “bad dyes” (particularly Shredder).
Unfortunately for my sister-in-law, he learned how to say it correctly; as they were standing in line at the grocery store he spotted two women in niqabs and excitedly pointed them out to his mom, yelling “LOOK MOM, BAD GUYS!”.
I knew I remembered seeing this a few years ago. I found it after a quick search.
This headline is from 2017, in a newspaper in Pratt, Kansas, population 6500.
Students get first hand job experience