Editor's Corner

Good morning, my little pumpkin spice readers!

I was searching for some funny translations or a fantastic English fact to send you when I received an email from my mom. She sent the following link, which became today’s topic: typos. The article she sent is called 5 of the Most Famous Typos in History — History Facts.

I’ve seen some hilarious typos and accidentally made some of my own typos, so let’s see what the history buffs came up with.

1. The Wicked Bible. The first typo they mention is from 1631. A couple of royal printers were tasked with a reprint of the King James Bible. They dutifully accomplished the task, but when it came to the Seventh Commandment, “Thou shall not commit adultery,” they left out the “not.” A bible encouraging people to commit adultery horrified the current king, and he demanded all copies be burnt. He also fined the men and took away their license. Approximately 20 copies survived and are rare collectors’ items.
2. NASA’s $1 Million Typo. Much later, NASA earned this claim to fame in 1962. A misplaced hyphen resulted in a programming error, which called for the destruction of a shuttle that had just taken off for Venus. In the article, NASA said it wasn’t a missing hyphen, it was the “omission of an overbar for the symbol R for radius (R instead of R̅) in an equation,” as well as a guidance antenna on the atlas, which caused the failure.” The cost? $18.5 million (over $180 million today).
3. Lincoln Memorial. The marble statue of Lincoln was created in 1922. As they prepared for the dedication, someone noticed a typo in the marble-carved transcription of one of his speeches. It said, “WITH HIGH HOPE FOR THE EUTURE.” Eventually, the error was corrected by filling in the bottom line of the “E,” but the flub is still visible to those looking for it.”
4. D or d. In 1934, the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary was published. It included a special non-word, dord, between two real words. “Dord was listed as a noun referring to density in the fields of physics and chemistry. The intended entry was actually ‘D or d.’” The error remained undiscovered for five years.
5. Google. This is straight from the article:
   In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, named their new search engine “BackRub.” [KC – What the heck were these guys doing?] As their project grew, the tech duo began looking for a new name, and fellow Stanford student Sean Anderson reportedly suggested the name “googolplex,” the name of an incredibly large number (1 followed by a “googol” of zeroes). Page suggested the shorter “googol,” which is the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Anderson typed the domain name to check its availability, but reportedly accidentally searched for “google.com.” The name stuck, and on September 15, 1997, Page and Brin registered the domain, a word that, while a happy accident, nonetheless succinctly reflected their mission to organize the world’s information.

That’s all I have for today!

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Technical Publications

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