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County to pay $40,000 to fix typo on election ballot
The L was missing in public. "My first thought was, 'Oh crap,'" says the county clerk. (Grand Haven Tribune)
October 11, 2006 | Permalink
Comments
proofreading is a bear...
Posted by: | Oct 11, 2006 11:36:53 AM
nobody should have said anything and just let it go. if that many proofreaders missed it, chances are not _that_ many voters would notice. and besides, if you're old enough to vote, you're old enough to see the word "pubic"
it's a total waste of taxpayer $$$
Posted by: | Oct 11, 2006 11:42:28 AM
What idiods.
Posted by: JDubs | Oct 11, 2006 11:44:34 AM
They probably don't use proofreaders... they just depend on spell-check.
Posted by: Jack | Oct 11, 2006 11:56:14 AM
I'm sure he only said, "Oh, crap..." ;-)
Actually, the word "public" is one that I always remember as an editor. That's mostly because of a story I was told by one of my journalism professors. She was put in charge of doing her school board's newsletter some years ago after this type of incident took place. The English teacher formerly in charge accidentally let the phrase "pubic education" go out on about 5,000 newsletters and caught heck for it. The kids, naturally, loved it.
As a result, I've never been able to look at the word "public" while editing without remember that story.
Posted by: Swangirl | Oct 11, 2006 11:58:17 AM
Dang! Meant to say "remembering that story." Editors can't edit themselves worth a flip.
Posted by: Swangirl | Oct 11, 2006 11:59:22 AM
Hey, just do a Google News search. This is a very common typo. Today alone we have:
Rahall, Wolfe should meet in pubic forum
He has dedicated his career to pubic service
"Peter admits this, but draws on the example of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff to put the case for an increased reliance on pubic transport"
"In the pubic sessions and especially behind the scenes, the Dalai Lama was quick to smile, joke, and enjoy spasms of muffled laughter"
"Unidentified men Sunday afternoon had abducted a Tamil youth named Simon Godwin Nixon at a place near pubic cemetery in Mannar."
"Not only were these assertions anti-Semitic, but they also were contrary to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids the government to establish a religion, or to establish a religious test as a condition of pubic office."
And among those are the instances where pubic is used correctly.
Posted by: Nate | Oct 11, 2006 12:24:33 PM
Since pubic is in the dictionary, it's not going to be flagged as a misspelling. This is why I put pubic and other words in MS Word's "exclude" dictionary. Other words you might want to include (Word doesn't treat these as misspellings): Mw, vender, delver, ca, fro, jus, les, manger, mo, pf, wt, und, yearend, yore. Then those words typically not appropriate for business correspondence: c*ck, f*ck, f*cker, p*ss, p*ssy, s*it, t*ts, s*ck
Posted by: John | Oct 11, 2006 12:29:11 PM
It happens a lot more often than you would think. One of my favorite things to do when I'm really bored is do a Google News search for "pubic" and laugh at all the results that come up (90% of them are this same typo)
Posted by: The Tim | Oct 11, 2006 12:33:33 PM
I made that mistake ONE time in school and was so embarassed by it I never made it again....
Had it been a female teacher it probably wouldn't have been so bad!
Posted by: Average Jane | Oct 11, 2006 1:17:24 PM
I was the chief election judge for a municipality for two terms.
Our elections are in early January. The first election, I put the wrong year on the ballots. (the current year at the time, not the year of the election). Luckily, I caught it as I handed it to the printer.
Posted by: Joe | Oct 11, 2006 1:30:13 PM
What they should have done is 'leaked' a few of the ballots out and 'recall' them and 'recover' all but 'one'...then sell that on Ebay!
It would have to be an inside job!
Pubic Forum! Funny!
Posted by: Rusty | Oct 11, 2006 2:00:45 PM
I'm sure this is very common. In fifth grade, our first year of sex education, someone (I still remember his name but am not going to use it to protect the innocent) misread "pubic hair" as "public hair." Which, of course, was hysterically funny then ... and still kinda is.
Posted by: Ambs | Oct 11, 2006 2:49:48 PM
It must be something about the letter "l." I worked with an old newspaper guy who remembered a time with the "l" was missing from a TV listing of that classic game show, "Beat the Clock."
Posted by: RainMaker | Oct 11, 2006 3:31:34 PM
A local car dealership had a big sign that was up for weeks that read "Huge Pubic Sale." I got my picture taken in front of it. If they're willing to let it go for a month, I deserve to have it forever preserved in a photo album.
Posted by: jwa | Oct 11, 2006 7:35:54 PM
Heh. Reminds me of this one class in high school. We were reading biology definitions out loud, and one girl read "organism" as "orgasm". We all wondered if it was a Freudian slip or if she actually had that written down.
Posted by: Day | Oct 11, 2006 7:57:08 PM
