Monday, December 05, 2011

1634 Tpyos

With the preponderance of words which is our culture comes the inevitable concurrent preponderance of typos. Mistakes. Screw-ups in print.
And now electronics.
They used to say, "Never hire a dyslexic typesetter." Now it's "...electronic editor." Error's been with us for a long time, we just have more opportunities now.
How long? I was reading an article in National Geographic recently about the original King James Bible. And how even though it was inspired, it still had typos. Seems one of the first editions was riddled with errors—among them one of the Ten Commandments itself. Like Moses got a rock chip in an inopportune place on the tablet. The phrase "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" left out the "Not."
Oops.
"Sorry you're upset Maebelle, but the Bible told me so..."
The other phrase they messed up said people should celebrate God's "Greatnesse." Except the N was missing and the E was rendered as an A and so pious people were enjoined to celebrate God's Great Asse.
But come to think of it, when you sit in judgment on the universe, it's not a bad idea to have a great foundation.
Flash forward a few hundred years and head to the biblical information equivalent of our age, the internet. People are still making mistakes. Except now in a classic entrepreneurial 21st Century way, there are other people ready to reap the reward for it.
It’s estimated the 250 most trafficked websites miss about $285 million in revenue a year in lost sales to typosquatters. Yep typosquatters, like Goggle.com and f-a-e-c-book instead of f-a-c-e-book.
Goggle.com received about 835,000 unique visitors in September alone.
Seems there's money in them there typos, whether you're religious or not. Maybe fun too.
Just ask the dyslexic atheist who believed there was no dog.
America, ya gotta love it.

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