A hairdresser in Norway had a sign that said “Fri syre for all” instead of “Frisyre for alle”. In Norwegian it’s a common error to divide words that should be written together. In this case the meaning was changed from “hairstyles for everyone” to “free acid for everyone”.
I was teaching my dialysis tech students about infectious diseases, and I noticed that on the study sheet I passed out to them, I wrote “hepatits”. Oops.
When I was testing software, I meant to write an error report with the title “No error message when X shuts from overload condition.”
I actually wrote “No error message when X shits from overload condition.”
The funny thing was, nobody seemed to notice. When the problem was fixed and the report came back to me to test the fix, that’s when I first noticed it.
I’m still fond of a salutation I found on a letter I was proofing. It said:
Dear Sir or Madman
I was so, so tempted to let it go out like that, too.
In the Sarasota [Florida] Herald-Tribune in approximately December of 1973, there was an article about euthanasia. They spelled it “youth in Asia.” Not just once, but consistently, each time they used the word in the article.
Well, in the original text the word “colons” wasn’t italicized. I added italics for emphasis in my quote, which I forgot to mention. Other non-English words in the same book were italicized, which led me to believe that someone made a boo-boo in the sentence I quoted.
Still funny.
I think from now on I’m addressing ALL my letters as “Dear Sir or Madman!”
Hee.
Funny thing is, that’s usually how my co-workers actually describe an application quitting because of an error, so I guess the message would get through either way.
Yeah, the beauty of it was that the typo version makes as much, if not more, sense.
I once read (on one of those lists of funny mis-translations) about an incident when the airport in Phoenix, Arizona put up signs in Spanish saying that you had to be 21 years old to purchase alcohol. The way they describe age in Spanish is different than the way we do it in English. Instead of saying “I am 28 years old” (Yo soy 28 años viejo), I would say “I have 28 years” (Yo tengo 28 años)
Unfortunately, they used “anos” instead of “años”. So what they said was, “You must have 21 anuses to purchase alcohol.”
I got a memo at work once referring to the location of our business (The Clock Tower Plaza), only it called it the Cock Tower Plaza.
Years before, at a different job in a hotel restaurant, we used to receive printouts of the hotel room numbers and the names of the guests staying in each of those rooms in case the guest wanted to charge his or her meal to the room. One night, I was assisting a waitress with verifying a guest’s room number. We looked at the printout and were amused to see that the guest’s name, Guy, had been mistyped as “Gut.” That was years ago, and it still makes me smile.
I nearly forgot this one! I found this in my church bulletin some years back. We were going to have a cookout at a park near a lock and dam. When the announcement was printed in the bulletin, the guy typing it all up stated the location as being the _____ Lock and Damn. He was totally embarrassed!
Is the joke just that he misspelled “dam”, or also that he forgot to include the name of the dam?
Well, this is another heard one instead of a typo, but years ago a local TV weatherman started off his report with “Our weather today is being dominated by a cold Canadian mares ass…”
*(Make that “air mass”)
That one occurs quite frequently - our own marketing department will immediately remove “pubic” from any spellchecking dictionary. I think it was a donation guide for the Boy Scouts which mentioned their usage of “pubic campgrounds” which started the crusade. Worse yet, you can read the word five times and not notice it.
I discovered the inner beauty of MS Word’s autocorrect ‘feature’, when an essay on medieval music no longer discussed mensuration, but, well, I think you can guess…
Classified ad:
Itty Bitty Male Yorkshire Terrorist. Very Aggressive. $1000
I was on the school newspaper in 12th grade. One month, our editor-in-chief’s column had the following written under her byline: “EDIOT-IN-CHIEF” 
A girl I used to work with some years back was named Neema. I always felt bad for her because when people wrote memos and spell-checked them without paying attention, MS Word would always change her name to Enema. Poor thing, but they always made for some funny emails… “Please see Enema about the staff Christmas party.”
About three years ago in Everquest, my guild leader attempted to reply to something or other with “Fuck them all!” An error in spacing turned it into “Fuck the mall!” It stuck.
A TV listing of the movie *Outland * said it took place “on one of Juniper’s moons.”