Funny typos (that you may or may not have caught)

[2muchcoffeeman]

Can I blame soccer on this thread too, or shall I head directly to the chilly shores of the Lake of Fail (just 15 minutes from Lake Tahoe)?

 

[Bud_Bundy]

Oh God, I forgot this one. Back in the waning days of our AM/PM paper, the PM was nothing more than a remade AM with added late results and the occasional new story. We did the conversion with one copy editor who showed up at o'dark thirty. On this day, some story came in on West Virginia doing something or the other, and our less-than-clueless copy editor, in the headline, called the Mountaineers the, and I kid you not, the Mountain Ears. His excuse? He was rushed.

 

[Slacker]

around Thanksgiving, copy desk had a headline about donations needed at local food panties

Give 'til it hurts.

 

[JimmyHoward33]

Not a typo, but we had a fellow named Black go to a soccer tournament in Africa, and the original jump head read

BLACK: Podunk man plays for Zimbabwe

 

[I Should Coco]

Back in the day, we used to have a system where you could put things like this [ brackets] that wouldn't get in the story. I believe you had to use the brackets and a space before the extra words.

The funniest one to get through was a reporter putting a reminder of how to pronounce someone's name. The last name was Koch and she had ( like the rooster) after it. With parentheses, not brackets ...

It was deep within a story, but I still laugh about that one.

 

[dixiehack]

Mine was saying a baseball player was "hit by a bench," but it was caught in editing.

Somebody had to write about Chuck Finley.

In Valdosta we printed a handful of shirtty weeklies for the surrounding counties. One of them had an ad for a "Part-Tim Copy Editor."

 

[Deskgrunt50]

Had high schools named Holy Child and Horace Mann in our area. Prevented this headline from getting in: Horace Mann crushes Holy Child.

 

[swingline]

We had a softball team named "Destined for forking Mediocrity" get into the agate one time. That WAS the team's name, but our dipshirt agate clerk added the "forking" to the name (we believed but couldn't prove), and those of us on the desk that night got interrogated the next day.

Not really a typo, but similar-ish.

 

[DeskMonkey1]

This is going to out me, I'm afraid, but I once put "Podunk High remains uneaten" instead of unbeaten.

 

[Mr._Graybeard]

Better to always type PUBLIC in all caps and figure the copy desk will catch it and lower-case it, than risk the other...

In my town there was a loose confederation of corporate types and professional chin-strokers who got together on occasion at a gathering called the Public Police Forum. It was our newspaper's turn to sponsor the gathering, and the top editor viewed it as a big deal and a weighty responsibility. So much so, that he personally edited the type in the invitation that went out, despite having an army of copy editors at his disposal.

Sure enough, the hundreds of of invitations that were mailed beckoned the chosen to the Pubic Policy Forum.

 

[Mr._Graybeard]

This isn't a typo, but one of the funniest things I ever saw get into print was a photo from a summer city festival in central Wisconsin. One of the popular "fun" events of the day was the bed race, where people would put brass beds on wheels and push them down the street at a run. And a popular fashion at the time: track shorts.

One of the bed race contestants was wearing track shorts, apparently without underwear. The excitement of the event and friction against the fabric made him turgid, and his schlong popped out of one leg of his shorts. The local paper had a photographer on the scene, and he shot a pic of that bed race with schlongpopper front and center. The editors failed to recognize the man's exposed appendage as male genitalia and published the photo on the front page, four colums above the fold.

 

[ChrisLong]

We had a camera-ready ad from a sporting goods store. One panel was for a sleeping bag. It had a picture and a cartoon-ish guy in it. Halfway down there was a bulge that was highlighted ... and the guy had a contented smile on his face.

Another was for workout clothes, like spandex. The seam came right through the crotch area and it looked like the guy in the photo had boner.

What do you do with camera-ready ads when you're doing final page checks at midnight??