Susie Dent on the joy of typos

This morning, a friend sent me a screen grab of a TV news programme that was running a feature about education. Next to an earnest-looking presenter ran the caption: ‘School two easy for kids’. As someone has pointed out, School One must have been hell.

The episode has inevitably reminded me of the many typos I’ve encountered over the years, and how they can make even the most seasoned lexicographer laugh out loud.

Many of the best examples can be found in online comments in response to an article or video. Beneath one popular magazine’s round-up of the best perfumes, for example, a reader proceeded to wax lyrical about a particular ‘eau de colon’ that her boyfriend wears. Worse, she went on to enthuse over how she could still smell his ‘colon’ on her pillow every morning.

This is a worthy runner-up to the advert on a well-known online marketplace for a ‘Baby bath plus poo’ – both, it continues, in ‘excellent condition’.

Typos are no respecter of office, either. A member of the campaign team for ex-US senator Mitt Romney once approved a poster emblazoned with the slogan ‘A Better Amercia’. An embarrassment, for sure, but typos can also be costly.

One committed by Nasa in 1962 led to the crash of a probe that was to deliver invaluable data on Venus. A missing hyphen in the agency’s coding is said to have caused the craft to malfunction within minutes of its launch. It was subsequently described as ‘the most expensive hyphen in history’.

Of course, very few of us have managed to escape a typo in a text message or email. One dog groomer sent a notification to a pooch’s owner with the words ‘Dexter is dead now’, only realising minutes later that their autocorrect had inexplicably substituted the word ‘ready’.

Another woman, wishing to confide in a friend that she needed a hysterectomy, sent instead news of a ‘hissy erectomy’. Realising the mistake, she tried again, only to tell her friend she was booked in for a ‘hipster recipe’. Better that, perhaps, than another woman’s lament about her insomnia to her husband with the text message: ‘I think it’s related to the “men’s pants”’. What she wanted to say was ‘menopause’.

Menus are a notorious source of mistakes. I still remember the ITV canteen offering ‘dips and crudities’, while a friend’s local restaurant regularly offers ‘Scissor salad’.

Mind you, it helps if the proprietors have a sense of humour. On one takeaway menu spotted in the wild, the names of Cantonese dishes had been lovingly translated into English – until the writer clearly ran into difficulty. Under one item it read: ‘I can’t find it on Google but it’s delicious’. In a similar vein, another restaurant menu is said to have offered ‘stir-fried Wikipedia with onions’.

Road signs seem to attract typos like no other. One of my favourite examples is the Welsh signpost that intended to say ‘No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only’. Given that signposts in Wales need to be bilingual, the text was duly sent to a translation office, and the sign was completed with ‘Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu’. So far, so good, except this text actually translates as ‘I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated’.

You might think that in these days of multiple spellcheckers and autocorrect our communications would be faultless. The reality is that we need to be pretty good at spelling to rely on technology.

Just ask the shop owner whose computer autocorrect resulted in the sign: ‘We apologise for any incontinence’. Or indeed the website that once asked visitors a fundamental question before they closed the page: ‘Are you sure you want to exist?’