If we’re talking “verbal typos,” I know of at least one case in a movie where the actress claimed to be from LEE-ma, Ohio, which is actually pronounced LI-ma due to the lima beans grown in the area.
It’s probably no fair to pick on an ethnic restaurant’s menu, but the other evening, we went to a Vietnamese restaurant that had some that slight unfamiliarity with the language shouldn’t excuse. Top marks go to item 10 on the menu, under appetizers, “Pancakes.” The description read "Description, " and the price was “$xy.zt”
And shows that refer to “the 95”.
Bumping because I just finished reading World Gone By by Dennis Lehane. It’s about Gangsters in Tampa during World War II, set in 1942. Late in the book, there’s this exchange:
Uh, yeah - Belize wasn’t called Belize until 1973 - before that it was British Honduras.
And English is, and certainly was in the 40s, the official language. In the 40s they didn’t even teach Spanish - today it’s about 30% Spanish, 70% local English Creole. I’ve been to both countries, and I’ve found that the Creole spoken in Belize is actually easier to understand than either Jamaican Patois or the official Jamaican Standard English.
So maybe some more research could’ve helped on that one.
I read this one in Reader’s Digest.
They meant to refer to a general as “battle-scarred”. It came out as “bottle-scarred”.
Then they published a correction where they referred to him as “battle-scared”.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - a tech writer corrected some documentation I wrote with some meaningless change. I e-mailed back telling her not to be so anal retentive. She responded “anal-retentive” should be hyphenated.
Many years ago, I was a professional typesetter, and something I was working on referred to someone having been inspired by Rachmaninoff’s *Second Violin Concerto. *I changed it to *Second Piano Concerto, *and put a note in the margin, to the effect that Rachmaninoff didn’t write any violin concertos. I have no idea whether the client allowed the change.
Apparently “take a different tact” is the new normal.
I saw an ad in The New Yorker for the School of Design (design!) at Harvard University (Harvard!) that misspelled the school’s name in big bold letters…
Scanning errors are more and more prevalent.
I just read a book on the Russo-Turkish wars, and the scanner consistently read “iu” for “in,” and “Borne” for “Rome.” It also had a weird tendency to add a quote mark to the beginning of capital Ws.
I recently did some scanning of my own, and had to laugh when it replaced “down” with “clown.”