A cautionary tale from the spelling Nazis

I am by no means a great speller. This flaw was brought into crystalline focus in high school, to my embarrassment and the amusement of others. We had to do some sort of classroom activity that involved writing three adjectives that described ourselves on the whiteboard. One of the three words I chose was, unfortunately, intelligent. Even more unfortunately, I spelled it i-n-t-e-l-l-e-g-e-n-t. Oops. Luckily my sense of irony (and lack of shame) was more well-developed than my sense of spelling.

I work in the writing profession nowadays, though, so I am keenly aware of the importance of spelling. The ironclad rule is always - spellcheck, read through, and send to a proofer. For some odd reason, I seem to be uncannily able to identify misspelled words, even if I can't always spell them properly on my own. This serves me well, though, and also makes for some amusing moments.

Case in point: if you're a national news outlet, you'd think a crew of editors, proofreaders, etc. would be employed to ensure your news releases are grammatically correct and, at bare minimum, properly spelled. But as today's WTH moment illustrates - no such luck. I was perusing the news on Yahoo! a few days ago, and came to this picture and its caption. The caption struck me as odd, and the more I looked at it, the more certain I became that the opening sentence contained - what else? - a typo.



Oops. Kiddies, I remember this one from grade school. The plural of moose is moose....the plural of deer is deer.....the plural of wolf is wolves. Not "wolfs" as in "wolfs down this amusing spelling error with glee".