Plvoer and Other Spelling Mishaps

Last week the town of Plover, Wisconsin came into the limelight over a mistake made by the painting crew of the local water tower.  Mistakes happen.  Sometimes people are very forgiving and sometimes not.  Sometimes people laugh at the situation, which is what happened in Plover.

The painters had unintentionally transposed the templates for the letters of Plover, which led to the letters being painted out of correct sequence.  One of the first groups to notice the mistake was the local fire department.  Within a day or so, the incorrect spelling was changed, but the memes had already taken off.  To see a few of them, click here.

Along the lines of unintentional mistakes, we certainly have all encountered Autocorrect errors, especially on our phones.  My funniest is when I was at St. Jude a few years ago.  I had typed something like, “I’m in ER at St. Jude.” What I ended up sending to David and Andrea was “I’m in ER at St. Judea.”  (I was in Fullerton, not the Holy Land.)  While the people behind Autocorrect might be well-meaning, they have caused all of us extra work just to correct the errors.

Last week when I was doing research on the Japanese internment camps, I came across something else.  I read more than one blog that used interment for internment.  I saw it so many times that I started questioning myself.  Does interment have more than one meaning?  It doesn’t.  The Japanese Americans might have thought that their camp felt like a burial, but they were sequestered in their camp, not buried there, for the most part.  Actually, very few people died in the camps in the three years they were open.

But some mistakes can be critical.  There’s the case of “the most expensive hyphen in history,” dubbed so by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey.  In 1962, Mariner 1, on its way to Venus, veered substantially off course because of a missing hyphen (some say a missing decimal) in the code.  At that point, there was no way to right the situation, so NASA ordered Mariner 1 to be blown up five minutes after launch.  The loss at that time was over $18 million.

If our mistakes are not critical, though, we perhaps need to be amused by them.  We live in such a fast-paced world that it is pretty easy to make a mistake.  We do need some laughter these days.