I’ll admit it: I have a disorder. If I’m handed a sheet of paper filled with text, the typographical and spelling errors will typically leap off the paper, grab my me by the ears, and divert my attention toward themselves. It’s like putting on a pair of 3D glasses. It’s a suitable disorder, as I’m a proofreader and former city & county Spelling Bee champion. Sometimes I find some fun ones, like the sign above.

I derive no glee from pointing out the typos of others. While I don’t believe in karma, typographical or otherwise, I can’t help but wonder if I’m about to make a similar mistake while writing about the errors I find. Uh oh. It is 2:45 in the morning, after all (I woke up hungry). Is it unreasonable, however, to expect schools and learning centers to proofread their signs for obvious spelling or punctuation errors? I think not.

This reminded me of something I spotted a week or two ago, as I was hiking back from what used to be Hillside Park. While attempting to approach the top of the “park” I figured that the best I could do was to park in St. Mary’s Cemetery and hop the fence. On the way back to the truck I got an eerie feeling. My “spider-sense” was kicking in, so I stopped and turned slowly. Yep…there it was: a typo.

I’ve intentionally obfuscated the name on this stone, which actually sits in the middle of several markers of the same last name. Since I pretty much have a King James Bible handy as often as I do my camera bag, I grabbed one and compared the text on the stone to Psalm 107:

He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions. (v20)
Uh oh. The stone clearly says “DESTRURTIONS.” Dang.

Well, I’m sure I’ll go ahead and make a ton of typographical errors now. Feel free to point them out. I’ve earned it. While I don’t believe in “typo karma” I do have a strong appreciation for irony! In the mean time, I’ve shoveled enough Frosted Flakes into my head to choke a donkey…and now it’s time to return to bed.

UPDATE: We have a winner! Kudos to my friend Ken, who spotted a typographical error in the very first paragraph of this post (and called to verify that I didn’t plant it there on purpose). I didn’t remove it; rather, I just put a line through it and corrected it for the world to see. See? No one is immune from the sinister typo…especially those of us who point them out in other people’s work!

Dawn found the second one. Sigh…

It’s that time of year again: the ubiquitous “Restrictions in Effect” signs are popping up around the periphery of Bismarck. Restrictions of what nature, you ask? If your only source of information is these signs, I suppose it’s anyone’s guess.

I saw these signs go up two years ago and thought they were pretty funny. Obviously it’s because of the load restrictions on Bismarck roads, which I heard about on the radio, but the signs are vague enough to omit that detail. It’s only after someone figured out what was missing and wedged a little “Load” in there that the signs made sense:

This is how the corrected signs looked last year. I was actually surprised to find an unmodified one posted up along Divide Avenue this afternoon. The top two pictures are from today, the bottom picture from last year. As you can see in this post from last March, I was almost second-guessing whether I’d even seen the signs without the word “Load” inserted. Today’s sighting of one of the original signs is a bit of a vindication, I suppose. Now someone’s going to have to dash up to Divide Avenue with another “Load” sticker!

I’m known as a neurotic proofreader, but it was actually my friend Luke Graner who pointed out this little gaffe along Washington Street. It could be a goof by whoever made the sign for the ECLC, I suppose; however, it seems to have escaped the notice of anyone in charge. If a sign with a blatant punctuation error shows up for your business or organization, it’s prudent to have the sign company rectify the problem… especially if your business is education!

That reminds me of some of the vehicles I’ve seen around town with Bismarck spelled wrong. Even when I was a kid, I noticed that some of the Cass Clay trucks in Mandan had that misspelling. Then there was the time the phone books had “Bismark” on the spine…that one made the news when I was working at KFYR TV.

One of my other favorite examples of a sign snafu was this truck, which sits along the nature trail on the Mandan side of the Missouri River:

Below is a photo of the truck as it sits…it probably went through most of its useful life of service with that mistake on the door! I didn’t look to see what the other side said, although I doubt it would have the same misspelling. I figure the artist got a phone call in the middle of painting “Bismarck” on the door or something. Don’t you hate getting interrupted? On a hand-painted door, it’s pretty hard to claim it was just a typo!

I’m not immune to making such mistakes, of course. I just think they’re interesting to point out. I’ve made plenty of oversights of my own. It’s embarrassing when it happens…especially to those of us who point out the occasional mistake of others!

I had to chuckle when I saw this ad for Eide Ford last night – Bismarck was missing a C! It’s no surprise, really…these ads aren’t produced in Bismarck, or even in North Dakota to the best of my recollection. When I was in local television, they were shipped in from out of state and aired locally. At that time I think it was South Dakota, now it seems someplace that doesn’t know how Bismarck is spelled.

In any case, I saw the ad go by this morning with the C where it should B. No harm, no foul. At least somebody else caught it and fixed it. It would be pretty embarassing to have your business’s home town misspelled on an ad trying to earn the trust of people in that town:

Oops. As far as I know, this one might still be driving around. Is it the fault of the advertiser? Probably not, unless they were shown a copy of the ad to approve before it went on the bus. That’s standard procedure. But the initial typo is most likely not theirs. Unfortunately, it’s their name that gets associated with the misspelling.

No worries, this has been going on since the 1800s. Sooner or later we’ll all get it right. Until then, it’s just fun to point it out. Remember when the phone books had it wrong a few years ago? That even made the news! I’m glad I live in a community where misspelling it on the phone books is newsworthy. Besides, it helps hone the proofreading skills.

These first-class train tickets from the 1870s show that people have always had a problem with the proper spelling of our fair city. Bismarck sprang to life in 1872 and got its current name a year later, so it’s a reasonable conclusion that the name has been a source of misspellings ever since. How many times is misspelled on your mail?

I posted about this truck a long time ago, and I remember seeing Cass Clay trucks at the facility in Mandan with the same error. Then there were the ill-fated phone books of about ten years ago, which I believe were Yellow Book products. Oops.

What would Otto von Bismarck think? After all, our capital city was originally named Edwinton but later renamed after Herr Chancellor in order to attract German immigrants (and investment in the railroad).