Way back in the 1970s I began to notice misspellings in magazines and newspapers. Sometimes in advertising. In the early 80s, I walked into a store selling "brain caps" for Halloween -- plain old white cotton painter's caps that had been tie-dyed to imitate the folds in the gray matter, the outer layer of the brain. A sign on the table top and each tag on each cap said, "No to caps are the same." Just say no to caps?
And that was before the interwebs when any person sitting at a keyboard could try to type out a message and post it where everybody could try to read it. Sometimes you just have to laugh or you will cry from the annoyance and irritation of it all.
About 20 years ago I wasted a lot of time reading comment boards on CNN after 9/11. I recall one that said, "The proof of bin Laden's quilt . . . ." Bin Laden had a quilt? I thought he just had a bunch of Afghans!
And speaking of quilts, the area of fiber arts and needlework is rife with just bad and wrong usage by people who don't know what they're talking about. Crochet has been misspelled "crotchet" or "crotch" too many times in eBay listings. An embroidery kit might be listed as "cruel" when the package clearly says it is "crewel embroidery."
These errors are everywhere. You just have to shrug your shoulders and laugh them off because some of them are unintentionally funny. A large supermarket had a sign above their floral section offering "bokays" for a special low price. A pharmacy in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s had these words painted above their main entrance: "Fast Fred Delivery!" When my sister had to get a delivery from that shop, we asked the guy if he was Fred. My mom's assisted living facility distributed the menu on Saturdays for the upcoming week. We laughed about the starting course for one evening: a "cream of salary soup." Watch out for whole, un-chopped-up coins!
