Comments on: Annals of Unfortunate Spellcheck Accidents

By: rea

rea — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 15:26:20 +0000

When I was in legal practice, I had a case in which the opposing lawyer’s first name was Spero. It was only my eagle-eyed secretary who corrected a letter in which spellcheck had “corrected” the name to “Sperm”.

Similar experience in which opposing counsel’s name, “Yanich,” was rendered, “Eunuch.”

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:52:34 +0000

Wordperfect used to mark “Piaget” as a spelling error and suggest “Piglet” as an alternative spelling.
One of my students turned in a paper with the sentence “The children had many guest ions.” She meant to say “questions”

By: toby

toby — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:50:08 +0000

I once typed in an acronym with a C, a T and an R , which stood for the organization for which I worked, and the spellcheck suggested the word “cretins”.

It got that right.

By: Preachy Preach

Preachy Preach — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:40:46 +0000

There’s a story that the Guardian, back in the 80s, obviously had had a harried sub do a global search and replace on an election story to remove references to ‘poll’ and replace with ‘turnout’. Which led to the article referring to the close defeat of Ms AJ Turnoutack’.

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.84.html

By: roac

roac — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:22:30 +0000

Not technically a spellcheck issue, but funny: A few seasons ago the chorus I sing with performed a Latin mass setting with a local semipro orchestra. Whoever was in charge of printing the program decided that instead of inviting patrons to buy an “ad,” it should say “sponsorship,” and did a global find-and-replace to that purpose. Which filled the mass text which was incorporated in the program with lines such as “Qui sedes sponsorship dexteram Patris, miserere nobis.”

By: mollymooly

mollymooly — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:09:11 +0000

"I stand for thouands of new green jobs for Dublin". Not a Cupertino, but funny in context.

By: Ludwig

Ludwig — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:32:02 +0000

You did mean to title this post “Anals of Unfortunate Spellcheck Accidents”, didn’t you?

By: gray lensman

gray lensman — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 03:52:22 +0000

Several years ago I saw a proofing job go wrong when thousands of envelopes, letterhead sheets, business cards, etc., were printed for the US Olympic Committee with the Y left out of “Olmpic”. The young woman who made the original mistake was distraught, but someone pointed out that numerous hotshot management types had signed off on the whole job, on both coasts, over a several month period. You see what you expect to see.

By: ignobility

ignobility — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:58:37 +0000

Many, many years ago, I was reading the want ads and saw one from Burger King that wanted a manager who was smart, energetic, and vicious.

By: paul

paul — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:54:58 +0000

The sadly defunct online newsletter for nerds Need to Know used to run a feature called "Puerile google misspellings". It listed innuendo-laden typos and spell check artefacts occurring frequently enough to return multiple results in Google. Examples included "ming boggling", "mailing lusts", "t-shitrs", and, best of all, "poofreading". From the same source, surely this extraordinary claim cannot be true?

By: Sassafras

Sassafras — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:20:21 +0000

I once got a dictated letter returned to me with a blank space in the middle of a line.

I took it back to the secretary, who got rather flustered. She couldn’t type what I’d said on the tape, she said, and I couldn’t possibly mean anything so rude.

Rude? What did she think I’d said?

She wasn’t quite sure, but she’d looked for it in the dictionary and couldn’t find it, so she’d tried it beginning with “ph” and it was all to do with “a man’s private parts” and surely I couldn’t mean that.

Ah. Fallacious…

By: Edis

Edis — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:03:07 +0000

I once nearly handed in a review dealing with the geography of Sikh settlements in an UK town with a table of references containing a mention of a then-active UK Politician Eunuch Power. Fortunately I did a bit of checking beforehand…

By: GeoX

GeoX — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:17:11 +0000

The single most common spelling error among freshman comp students is “defiantly” for “definitely.” This baffled me for a long time, but then I realized that they were almost certainly writing “definately,” which was being helpfully autocorrected into “defiantly” by Word.

By: Donald A. Coffin

Donald A. Coffin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:43:49 +0000

Apparently Zenith once had to trash an entire load of shipping cartons, because the company’s slogan appeared on the boxes as:

“At Zenity, the qulaity goes in before the name goes on.”

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:46:23 +0000

One place I worked once received a shipment of promotional mechanical pencils printed by somebody who forgot ‘i before e, except after c’.

What a weird mistake to make, especially when the rule you quote is so well known.