The Local Paper

The extra "i"s have it!

Typographical errors are in the news lately. I came across two typo stories in the last 48 hours; one charming, one an abject lesson.

The first from yesterday’s WSJ discusses errors in the engraving on Lord Stanley’s Cup.  Goalie Jacques Plante has his name spelled three different ways on the Cup.  Team names are wrong.  An Assistant Manger is identified as an “ass man”.  In general, guys are so happy and proud to have won the Stanley Cup that they’ll take it.  In all, it’s charming.

Then there’s the story of Hayden Panettiere.  Today’s Huffington Post reports that Ms. Panettiere (a person unknown to me until this morning) has a typo problem of her own.  Her tattooed philosophy  “to live without regrets” is being sorely tested by the fact that her desire to have this message written in Italian was not matched by either her ability to tell the tattoo “artist” how to spell it or the “artist’s” ability to read.  The result is a life-long, permanent “oops” moment.  The story does not report whether she regrets the incident.  I wonder if she’s crossed Italy off of her vacation list.

The desire or attractiveness of tattooing has always escaped me, so perhaps I’m less sympathetic to Ms. Panettiere’s fate than I should be.  Even at my most intoxicated, the thought of creating a permanent record of the event never occurred to me.  Running the risk of having a permanent spelling error is just reason #245 for me to avoid the “parlor”.

Topical Yogi Berra story (probably apocryphal, of course).  Yogi goes two-for-three, but the next day’s newspaper showed Berra only going one-for-three.  Yogi confronted the beat reporter for the paper about it.  The reporter apologized and said that it must have been a typographical error.   Yogi says, “Typographical error, my eye.  It was a clean single.”

UPDATE:  More tattoo typos in the news courtesy of the Huffington Post