A German company has developed a prototype pen that features spell check. The Lernstift ("learning pen") vibrates when it detects that you have misspelled a word in longhand. Here are 10 more tales about typos:
1 Google got its name from a misspelling of the word googol, which is the number "1" followed by 100 zeros.
2 Have you ever misspelled a Web domain name? Of course you have, and "typo-squatters" know that. They buy domain names similar to popular ones, except with a typo. Legal fights have erupted over sites such as gacebook.com (just one keystroke from facebook.com) and arifrance.com (two transposed letters away from airfrance.com).
3 Properties in the game Monopoly are named after places in the Atlantic City, N.J., area. But a misspelling was inserted early in the game's development. It should be Marven Gardens, not Marvin Gardens.
4 Buddy Holly's name was Charles "Buddy" Holley until it was misspelled on an early recording contract and he decided to go along with it, losing the "E."
5 Some misspellings are embarrassing. Some cost $40,000. That's what Ottawa County in Michigan had to pay to reprint ballots in 2006 that spelled "public" without the L.
6 F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were good friends who carried on a spirited rivalry about many subjects, including spelling. Hemingway claimed to be the better speller, though that's hard to judge. While Fitzgerald liked "ect." instead of "etc.," Hemingway was fond of "loveing" and "its-self." Fitzgerald probably lost this one, if only because he regularly wrote about his friend "Hemmingway" and even "Hemminway."
7 Markings on the street that misspell the word "school" have appeared all too frequently in the U.S. in recent years. Some of the errors said "shcool" (Kalamazoo, Mich., in 2007; Guilford County, N.C., in 2010; New York City in 2011; and Salt Lake City in 2012). But various Florida locations have featured a variant — "scohol" (in 2007, 2009 and 2011).
8 Criminals are often lousy spellers. The Manson family misspelled a Beatles song as "Healter Skelter" when writing it in blood at a murder scene. David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer, wrote police that he was not a "weman-hater." And one of the pieces of evidence linking Bruno Richard Hauptmann to the Lindbergh baby's kidnapping was that he misspelled words the same way as the writer of the ransom notes — "boad" instead of "boat," for example.
9 Marketers sometimes like to spell words wrong for effect. Examples include Froot Loops and Mortal Kombat. There's even a name for that practice — sensational spelling.
10 Alfred Mosher Butts was a self-proclaimed poor speller. Who was Butts? The inventor of Scrabble.
Mark Jacob is a deputy metro editor at the Tribune; Stephan Benzkofer is the newspaper's weekend editor.
mjacob@tribune.com sbenzkofer@tribune.com
Sources: "Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Google" by Corona Brezina; "Law of the Internet" by George B. Delta and Jeffrey H. Matsuura; "Icons of Rock" by Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz; "Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game — and How It Got That Way" by Philip E. Orbanes; "Crimes of the Century" by Gilbert Geis and Leigh B. Bienen; "U Cn Spl Btr" by Laurie E. Rozakis; "A Life in Letters," by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli; "Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961," by Ernest Hemingway, edited by Carlos Baker; "Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A.E. Hotchner" by Ernest Hemingway, edited by Albert J. DeFazio III; slate.com; cnn.com; The New York Times; Chicago Tribune archives; miaminewtimes.com; ksl.com; wistv.com.
