As a freelance copywriter, I pride myself on being able to spot a typo at 20 yards.
This can be both a real asset and a curse. Training your mind to notice errors in spelling, grammar and so on, is a bit like opening Pandora’s Box, or taking the red pill in the film The Matrix.
Typos jump out at you from everywhere – from shop signs, menus, TV ads – until you begin to wish you could go back and take the blue pill; erase what you know just to have a quiet life.
On the plus side, I thought it might make for an amusing blog post – here are 15 of the most unbelievable I’ve come across.
Embarrassing signoffs
The other week I met someone at a networking event, who told me that within the last few weeks, she had received numerous emails littered with spelling errors. The most cringe-worthy were:
“Apologies for the incontinence”
and
“Kind retards.”
I also have to hold up my hands here and admit that in my second ever full time job, I made an embarrassing error while typing my own job title at the bottom of a letter.
My job title was Public Information Officer. I missed out the ‘L’.
This letter was sent to over 100 libraries under the control of a local authority. Ouch.
It was around that time that I decided to get seriously good at proofreading!
The curse of the apostrophe
Ah, the glorious apostrophe! So misunderstood and misused.
In one particularly dull yet memorable lesson at secondary school, when we had a supply teacher in English, we were subjected to a 45 minute lesson on just apostrophes. It’s the only lesson I remember being exclusively about grammar, and however tedious, it must have sunk in because I’ve never really had a problem with the apostrophe.
However, plenty of people do. I’d go so far as to guess that the majority of the UK population don’t know when and how to use them correctly.
It’s not their fault of course. Whole generations of children (including my own generation) were never taught grammar at school and as more and more people use them incorrectly in very public places, it becomes a vicious circle – the more you see them used incorrectly, the more you assume it’s ok to use them in that way, and so on.
Here’s some I’ve recently noticed:
To gain entry onto this course, we’ll want to see that your enthusiastic and motivated and that you have the following qualifications…
The classic confusion of your (possessive) with you’re (meaning “you are”). This wasused on the ‘Entry Requirements’ section of a course page on a college website. Ooops. Ironic and highly embarrassing!
“10% of all curtains and fabric’s” – used on prominent point of sale materials inside a shop.
People often seem to think that ordinary plurals are in need of an apostrophe.
“Whose got what it takes to be the next quiz champ?”
Er, clearly not you! A poster advertising a local pub quiz competition; they really meant “who’s” (short for “who is”).
Humiliating mix ups
The classic typo is where letters have been added, removed or mixed up – the mistake is often so slight that it’s been missed by the writer, but can have hugely embarrassing consequences – like these three examples.
On a page about the Music Department in a school prospectus, the writer had mistyped the name of a music production package called ‘Cubase SX’ so that it came out as “CubeSex” instead! Oh dear. Cue hundreds of alarmed parents.
Even worse, a friend spotted this huge clanger on a takeaway menu for a curry house:
“10% discocunt for orders over £10”
Yikes.
And an ex-colleague of mine messed up while writing a very important council document that reported progress on a series of key performance indicators. Instead of quoting the official name of the KPI which was “Older people helped to live at home”, she wrote “Older people helped to love at home”. Now that’s a different KPI altogether!
Lost in translation
Incorrect translations into English have provided hours of entertainment for me in the past. I know these are not strictly typos in the classic sense, but they are still the result of not getting someone confident with the English language to check your wording.
My favourites are:
“Sugar’s little balls”
“Ice cream cancelled”
“Correct coffee”
All of these were spotted on the same menu in a European country I was visiting. I think the first phrase was trying to describe the ingredients of a dessert – presumably “little balls of sugar” – the second I guess might be a neutral flavour of ice cream (perhaps vanilla?) and the last one, who knows!
I also loved this one, which appeared on the instructions to a game found within a Christmas cracker:
“To decompose ball though into floor have fun!”
This has got it all – lack of punctuation, wrong choice of words and a typo!
What the heck?!
I have no idea how they managed to get these so wrong!
A whole pub menu where each description started with “ed with…” e.g. “ed with homemade croutons and wholegrain brown bread”! My husband is called Ed so this photo made for a popular Facebook post.
I once saw a shop misspell their name on their staff uniforms! Now that’s impressive. It wasn’t even a difficult name to spell.
So there you have it – undeniable evidence that people are generally pretty poor at proofreading. Hopefully that’s made you feel better about your own writing and cheered you up if you’ve made the odd gaff yourself in the past. You are in good company.
However, there is hope. Aside from using a professional proofreader, you can at least avoid embarrassing typos creeping into your website by using the multi-lingual spell check in SiteBeam.
By the way, the photo at the top of this blog post is real – I took it while on holiday in North Yorkshire.
