Given the recent turn away from hijacks, it may be a bit distracting to call them out in the thread in question for the obligatory gentle teasing, be it a casual brainfart or an autocorrect disaster, so here we are.
I used to have to type the word “county” quite a bit. Something about it made my fingers tangle-y. About 20% of the time it would come out “ocunty.” Very Irish of me.
So, way back when, I had an internship at the local newspaper, where I would mock up ad layouts for the typesetters and production. At the very end of my job, I came in during the last week to discover my boss waiting anxiously at my desk asking for my copies of my mockups from the previous evening. I pulled them and he sorted through and grabbed one as proof that I had mocked up a car dealership’s “PUBLIC SALE” when was then finished and printed in the paper as “PUBIC SALE”. Thank heavens the error was not mine.
That very same week, I had started my first post-college job and which involved a task of proofreading mock-ups of pull-out newspaper ads. I would mark and initial each mockup I approved in pink ink. That was to separate corrections from the other copywriters. In the paper the next week was our ad with a special price on Compact Dicks. Nope, I was saved again by making copies of my work. I did not review that ad.
A technical magazine I wrote for had an article about ISO 9000, with the word “Quality” in the title. Yep, that word was misspelled. EIC and I had a good laugh.
That’s likely because “pulic” and “publicc” will be picked up by autocorrect or spellcheck in a way that “pubic” won’t.
But automation can be your enemy too. A friend who is a journalist worked, in her youth, on a local newspaper covering (among other things) meetings of various local government bodies. She reported on one council meeting at which a Councillor called Cosgrave had been particularly active, and his name came up a lot in the copy that she inputted. This was a low-cost operation; no separate editorial checking. She failed to spot that his name was autocorrected (or, she accidentally accepted the autocorrect rather than rejecting it) and when the paper was printed he was referred to throughout as Councillor Castrate.
When something like this happens, the deal is that that the journalist involved has to ring the subject of the error and tell them about it before they read the paper themselves, or are told about it by someone else who has. Such calls are normally made before 7 am on the day of publication and people generally aren’t at their best at that time, even under the best of circumstances, so the call can be painful. Fortunately for her, politicians need the goodwill of journalists, and that probably made the councillor bite his tongue and swallow a lot of the comments he might otherwise have made to her in that call.
A nonprofit I volunteered for sent out a mass email where it talked about how the organization helped undeserved populations. Then they had to send out a correction.
A thread about the most common blood type out there? Very interesting! Very common, yet in very high demand because of it. I am Type A+ myself, but I would love to hear from others.
On military bases, well specifically Marine Corps bases, there are many signs and buildings labeled with many typos. It’s been too many years and I don’t remember any, but if I had a cell phone and wanted to take pictures, I’d have many many pictures of them. Regarding this, those bases are target-rich environments.