10 Favourite Typos

I never learned touch typing.

Believe it or not, I type with the thumbs, indexes and middle fingers of both hands, it’s a weird hybrid six finger technique that I developed myself that has stayed with me for more than 40 years.

In having written as much as I have, I know intuitively where all of the keys are. The six fingers in question know when to engage to hit the right keys. As a result, I rarely need to look down and can get words committed to paper pretty accurately.

But back at the office, I recall situations when accuracy suffered… often! It is amazing how last-minute urgent requests, conflicting priorities and needing to be in multiple places at once can conspire to help me conjure up a whole new language… or completely mess up the ones I supposedly know already.

Similarly, auto-correct has tripped me up a few times. I type a word correctly but auto-correct changes it to something obscure, rudely incorrect, or a word that I use so rarely that it makes me wonder if someone else has been using my computer. This is one of the reasons why I have a hard time trusting artificial intelligence (AI).

For all of these reasons, proofreading BEFORE hitting the “Send” button is incredibly important.

Yet some of the typos I have produced over the years have been known to make me stop and enjoy the absurdity, the humour, or both.

For your enjoyment, here are ten of my favourite typos:

– “A little farther” once became “a little farter”;

– When you look at the proximity of the d and the s on the keyboard, it should come as no surprise the unfortunate transformation of the word “add” to “ass”;

– When writing in French, the month of “mai” once became “maui”;

– Given the proximity of the d and the f on the keyboard, “good” came up as “goof” as in “I hope you had a goof weekend”;

– In correspondence in which the term “marital status” came up, I reversed a couple of letters and came up with “martial status”;

– Given the proximity of the h and the b on the keyboard, “I was humbled” once became “I was bumbled”;

– Even “Ivy the cat” was not immune to my typos as she was almost referred to as “Icy the car”;

– In one blog post, I started a passage with “I also saw” which I quickly decided to edit to “I also noted”, but because I didn’t delete the s, I ended up with “I also snoted”;

– When online shopping for sleepwear, my intention was to type “polo pyjamas” in the search box. I don’t know if I missed the L key or if auto-correct kicked in, but my search results came up empty when looking for “poo pyjamas”;

– One of my favourites was a message that discussed helping a group of individuals “stay in the loop”, but I was typing very quickly and nearly hit send when I realized it almost went out saying “stay in the loo”. It is amazing what a difference a good “p” makes.

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Have a great day,
André