Shame and Typos

It's probably not good to throw your laptop. Probably.

This weekend is the undergraduate conference that I host at Saint Francis. I'm excited but also worn a bit thin. This is the time in the planning process when the event goes fully into the death-by-a-thousand-cuts mode.

I have help. Lots of good help. But still, the little things pile up.

For example, this afternoon I send a campus-wide email announcing the event. There wasn't much to it. But I obsessed over every.single.word. After reading it through and reading it through some more, I finally hit send.

And then... the typo. It actually jumped off the screen and bit me in the armpit. Those things have sharp little teeth too. 

When I discovered the typo, I could literally hear the entire campus laughing. At me. In unison.

The truth is, typos and I have been battling it out for decades now. No matter what I do, though, the typo finds a way to win.

I wrote a book. It had an argument. A good argument. But it had a typo too (yep, just one). So the argument doesn't matter. Because all any reviewer has to do is say, "And on Page 73..." Then end. Shame and irrelevance await. I shall forever wear the Scarlet T.

The only consolation is that my typos have (so far) just needled away at my ego. I just found a delightful listicle entitled "10 of the Most Expensive Typos in History."

Here's my favorite:

 In 1631, London’s Baker Book House rewrote the 10 Commandments when a missing word in the seventh directive declared, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Parliament was not singing hallelujah; they declared that all erroneous copies of the Good Book—which came to be known as “The Wicked Bible”—be destroyed and fined the London publisher 3000 pounds.

So I guess it could be worse. Wicked worse.