Typos make me giggle.
OK, I don’t giggle as much when they’re on the front page of a glossy newsletter that just completed 150,000 copy print run, but I still try to find the humor when I can.
One of my favorite typos of all times happened years ago when I was working as a newspaper reporter in Montana. I was proofreading an article about a guest speaker coming to town to discuss buffalo diseases.
A hot topic, as you can imagine.
While reviewing the speaker’s bio, I stumbled across the following sentence:
Fred Smith became an expert on Brucellosis during the six years he spent as a buffalo in Yellowstone Park.
Once I stopped laughing and picked myself up off the floor, I did a little research and discovered Fred had not actually spent six years crawling around on all fours eating grass in a national park.
The missing word was “herder.”
It’s been more than a decade, but I still laugh every time I think about it.
In my current role as a romance novelist, I write a lot of love scenes. Things can get fast and furious at times, and it’s easy to slip up when it comes to pronouns. Never was this more obvious than when I got the following note from one of my critique partners:
“I know he’s a great lover and all, but did you mean to have him lick the back of his own neck?”
Do typos make you giggle, too? Please share your favorites!
I wish I could remember any! The ones in the New Yorker do make me laugh, and I’ve seen a couple of the Jay Leno books, which are also funny.
Mostly it matters that we can laugh at ourselves!
Lol. Your love interest is bendy.
Oooh! Just remembered a doozy from a cook book in Australia last year or the year before. “Add one teaspoon of crushed black people”. How mortifying. Yeah, they had to take that one off every shelf.
Okay, the one Sarah posted just made me laugh out loud.
As for the guy licking his own neck, it seems no sexy pirate crew would be complete without a contortionist in their midst, no?
ROF,L! Well, that WOULD make his singularly well-qualified as a buffalo expert. 😉
And if your hero can lick the back of his own neck…well, all I can say is, he must be quite popular with the ladies. 😉
Of course they make me laugh. I’m easy when it comes to that kind of thing. Wish I could think of a good one right now, but none come to mind.
Forget the typos, wherever did you find that picture of “Fred?” 😀
I wrote a blog post about typos, too, but I think your buffalo one takes the cake! This one, though, is just wrong (read the correction):
Typo
Right here is definitely an location that may possibly be of assist for you!…