Share your funny typo!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m doing proof-reading work at my University occasionally, and had the dubious pleasure of proof-reading my Professor’s latest book for typos, font settings and other stuff. I stumbled over what looked like an innocent typo, and found myself laughing for a quarter hour (on and off :-)) about this innocuous little spelling error:

“In 1865, Grant’s Union forces finally defeated Lee’s troupes.”

I corrected that sentence, then imagined Grant’s vaunted Union forces steamrollering Lee’s actors. Then I imagined Lee’s forces as a clown troupe being beaten by Union forces. THEN I imagined Lee’s clown troupes holding Grant’s forces off throughout 1864. By that time I was chuckling incoherently and getting weird looks from the folks around me…

So sue me if you don’t think this as funny, but share the funny typos you’ve come across…

2

I usually sign emails to people I don’t know that well “Regards, …” but almost always first type “Retards” and have to correct it.

3

The company was gathering employees’ recipes for a cookbook that would be sold as a corporate charity project. I submitted a couple of recipes including my wonderful crab dip. When the proofs came back, I edited a couple of mistakes but one never got changed and the final edition was published with my delicious Crap Dip right there in the first few pages of the appetizers section.

I suspect it was intentional and their plan worked because I bought several copies to send to family and friends.

4

A million years ago me & Mom were driving past Husky Stadium in Seattle. The marquis board near the entance invited all passers by to “Buy Season Ti’ts Now!”

Mom wouldn’t lend me the money. I was only 14.

5

At my old job, my boss got a resume that had someone listed as the manger of Burger King. Not just once - multiple times. Yes, spell check is great - but put some intelligence behind it!

Susan

6

I once typoed “LGBTT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and transsexual] Commission General Assembly” as “LGBTT Commission General Assmebly.”

I was enjoying picturing an LGBTT ass-mebly. (“Let’s get out there and meble some asses!”)

7

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

(oh, and hi and mwah, big boy. Long time no post.)

8

I used to manage a two-man resume shop and was its head resume writer. Our proofing procedure was for whichever of us wrote a resume to proof it, then hand it to our partner for a second proofing. Finally, when the client came in, before printing his/her copies, the client would proof it a third time, and then we were done. It almost always caught everything.

Almost.

There was one time when we had a man come in who was a factory worker looking to move up to a supervisory position at his factory. He wanted us to include the line, "Responsible for all shift work."

I’m sure you can guess which letter got left out. What’s worse, my assistant and I both missed it, and so did the client. The first person to notice was someone who was interviewing him. :smack:

After we apologized and reprinted all his stuff free of charge (even though we weren’t obligated to do so), he calmed down enough to see the funny side of it and said, “You know, boys, it’s true as written - I just didn’t want to put it that way.”

Another time a very attractive woman came in wanting a resume to go after a customer service job at MCI. The only problem was, all the work history she gave me was waitress-in-a-bar type stuff. When I was working up a summary of her skills, I mused to myself, “well, all of these jobs require a lot of contact with the public - I’ll sum it up by saying she has 7 years of public-contact experience.”

Darn it, those “L’s” sure are slippery… if you aren’t careful, they’ll get away from you.

The best part is, she called me during the two-day waiting period and said, “I have a confession to make. All the work experience I gave you is fake… I’m actually a stripper. I don’t want you to change it, because MCI will never consider me if I put my real job on there, but I thought you ought to know.”

So she comes in to review her resume. I know she’s a stripper. She knows I know she’s a stripper.

She does a double-take and starts to laugh. I look at her quizzically.

She says, “Honey, you’re not a titty-bar kind of guy, are you?” I allowed as how that was true and asked her what made her say so.

She showed me the typo and said, “It’s a state law - there’s no pubic contact allowed.”

It was days before I stopped blushing.

9

Not my typo, but the one I always think of.

After high school we made a super-8 film called Mutilation Maniacs. The main characters are (Chief of Police) Dick Ruffman and (Medical Examiner) Fred Sadizmo. Sadizmo defeats the mutilating aliens with a blow gun.

RUFFMAN: What happened?

SADIZMO: I got 'em with this, Dick!

Only my friend forgot the comma in Sadizmo’s line and failed to make the D in Dick’s name capital. The actress playing one of the aliens caught it.

10

shakes head no vigorously

11

Ah c’mon, it’s gonna be fun!

12

I usually type “mange” instead of “manage” and wind up going back to fix it. So far, nothing has gone out with that error that I know of.

One of my recent ones: A coworker called in sick, so I sent a quick email around the department: “Pete is feeling well–he won’t be in today.” Oops.

13

Don’t feel bad. Somewhere in a box in my closet, I still have an early '90s official manual from the State of California about testing to become a Notary Pubic.

And yes…I passed. :cool:

14

This isn’t really a typo, and I don’t have an exact quote, but I think it’s in the spirit of this thread.

Many years ago, my Mom was managing an academic journal for social studies professionals. Her immediate superior, the editor-in-chief, was the kind of silly person who insisted on replacing all references to Native Americans and /or Indians with his pet coinage, “Amerinds”, even when Native American authors themselves protested.

I sometimes helped her with the proofreading. One article submitted to the journal (by a PhD, no less,) began with a long and florid sentence. Attempting to make sense of this monster sentence, I went through it and crossed out all prepositional phrases, dependent clauses, and the like, to get just subject, verb and object. That supposedly gives one the heart of what the sentence means, as in this example:

The clowns in their silly costumes ride in the car which is red.

The clowns in their silly costumes ride in the car which is red.

The clowns ride.

When applied to this professor’s sentence, that procedure yielded (going from memory):

Now, I’m sure he meant to communicate “…caused Hitler to build the death camps in that place”, but that’s not what he actually wrote.

My mother agreed with my reading, and we aksed the professor to accept an edit, but he would not.

For some reason I’ve never forgotten the bizarre, macabre humor I found in the image of Hitler idly strolling across the ground somewhere in Europe, scuffing a boot in the dirt, and pondering: “Hrmmmm. Thick, clayey soil, unsuitable for agriculture…what can I do with this…I know! I’ll build concentration camps and send millions of people to their deaths! What a great idea!”

Sailboat

15

These might not be true typos either: some of them might be word choice errors involving homonyms; that is, someone mistook a word for a similar-sounding word and spell-checking never caught it.

The Washington Post is a great newspaper, but it has its goofy moments.

Last year I wrote in to point out an article in which they talked about a “hoard of termites” in a house foundation. I’m sure that a horde (massed army) is very scary, but I doubt any human thinks of termites as a hoard (hidden treasure).

I’ve all but given up complaining about the use of “honed in on [a target]” when they mean “homed” (sought a target), not “honed” (sharpened by rubbing).

I still saved the October 18 clipping of a sports article attributing a player’s departure from a football game to a “mile ankle sprain”. That’s one heck of an injury.

Sailboat

16

Probably the funniest typo I have ever made or will ever make was 20 years ago. I was working for a state agency providing legal assistance to small-town governments, and a request for assistance had come in from a brand-new “new broom sweeps clean” slate that had just been elected to replace a group of incompetents. On my trusty IBM Selectric, where the ½ key was directly to the right of the P, I typed a phrase that was supposed to be “…present and past town officials…” but what came out was “…present and ½ast town officials…” and the context made “half-assed” hilariously accurate. :o

17

I was helping to edit a book a few years ago. I mailed a copy of the disk to the publisher. She emailed me,

Dear meow meow,

Thanks for the dick.

!

She emailed me right back with,

Of course, I meant disk.

18

The local paper on the Washington coast once printed a classified ad for a child care worker that specified, “9 to 5, with occasional night shits.” We laughed a lot.

Then, a couple days later, the editor in chief did his editorial column on the error. Apparently he was just as entertained as we were, though embarassed as well. He wrote of other good typos of the past, my favorite of which was when they had written of a police manhunt being hampered by “3 inches of fresh snot on the ground.” Yep, that’d hamper things all right.

19

Yesterday I absentmindedly typed lobster bisque into Google as lobster burlesque.

Strange thing is, I found some.

20

Not my own personal typo, seen at my high school’s history fair in '98. In 5" tall black letters across the top of a tri-fold presentation board:
History of the Chicago Pubic Schools