Every March 8.
My favorite personal proofreading catch of all time stands as this sentence from a rural hospital's view book:
"We are dedicated to our primary mission: caring, expert, human-centered healthcare for the poor and undeserved."
un·de·served /ˌəndəˈzərvd/ adjective:
not warranted, merited, or earned
Undeserved. Undeserved! UNDESERVED! Oh, my heart!
Alas, although most of us understand the importance of proofreading, something somewhere somehow always slips by. It's inevitable, kind of like Elon Musk screwing things up under the sheer weight of his own ego.
For this issue, I've rounded up some of the worst (i.e. funniest, most public, most OMG) proofreading misses I know of. (Covfefe is not included.) Hopefully, they'll make you feel better about your own proofreading misses. At least you (probably) didn't cause the loss of millions of dollars like some of these did.
In no particular order:
NASA's unmanned Mariner 1 Probe blew up less than five minutes after launch in 1962 due to a missing hyphen.
In 2019, Australia's $50 bill featured an image of the country's first female parliament member. Unfortunately, it also featured a misspelling.
The Guardian (UK) newspaper poked fun at itself for its own self-identified worst typos in this hilarious piece.
Alitalia Air missed a couple of important digits when advertising a $39 business class fare from Toronto to Cypress in 2006. The company did honor the price for those lucky customers.
Merriam-Webster—yep, the dictionary—included a fictional word said to mean "density" in the 1934 edition. Worse, it wasn't found until 1939. Worse still, it wasn't corrected until 1947. (I'd argue we should bring back "dord" as an acceptable moniker for a blockhead.)
Mizuho Securities lost a whopping $225 million on a single stock trade in 2005 due to a value transposition. Whoopsie daisy.
Friends, for real, there's a typo permanently engraved on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Permanently. Engraved. The literal meaning of "it's carved in stone."
And friends, for real for real, let's not leave out the pretty major error in a 17th century printing of the Bible—yes, that Bible—which includes commandment #7 as "Thou shalt commit adultery." Let me know how that dinner conversation goes tonight.
Please join me in congratulating all the errors—past, present, and future—that remained unchanged despite multiple rounds of (and multiple eyes on) developmental edits, copyedits, and proofreading. Your persistence and tenacity are inspirational for us all! 🙌