Embarassing Typo
Confession: The mispelling (now fixed) in today’s comic got there acciddentaly; it wasn’t another little joke, just hubris striking. “Foreign” is one of those words I mispelled unknowingly for years. I’ve corrected it — on principal I usualy don’t edit comics after the first few minutes they’ve been up, but most of the time I’m around when they do. Due to my weird schedual I was out of touch for the last 14 hours, and came back to find I’d recieved something like 150 “I don’t know if you meant to do this, but …” emails. Oh, well. Its a lession in humillity.
October 8th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
I want to mention something about “schedual” but I fear I’ll be ensnared in some trap if I do.
October 8th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
And “Its” should be “It’s”.
Tee hee hee :) .
October 8th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I count 11 mitsakes, anyone see more?
October 8th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Also, “principal” -> “principle”, “lession” -> “lesson”, “humillity” -> “humility”.
I love this comic, by the way. Brilliant stuff.
October 8th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
> I’ve corrected it — on principal I usualy don’t edit comics after the first few
> minutes they’ve been up, but most of the time I’m around when they do.
You mean “principle”.
October 8th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Remco - “mitsakes” ;)
October 8th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Hah, I see what you did there.
October 8th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Julian, you might have also noticed misspelling, accidentally, principle, usually, and so on.
October 8th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Oh, blast. Missed “mispelling”, “acciddentaly”, and “usualy”. Now I’m starting to think you’re just messing with us.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Ow. Ow. This post huuurts my head. But yay for correcting it! :)
October 8th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
I always remember it as “Fo-Reign”, even though that’s not how it’s pronounced.
There’s also “We Ir (are) Weird” as a mnemonic.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
And let us not forget ‘embarassing’. (: Tried to sneak that past us by putting it in the subject line.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Well, crap. Now I don’t get the joke. :-(
October 8th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
I didn’t see the version with typo’s so I kinda don’t get the joke…
can anyone explain or does someone have the old version stored somewhere? :D
October 8th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I’m so upset…. I didn’t catch any of these, and I am the type of person exemplified in this comic.
:’(
October 8th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
I scowered my cashe for the origonal comic, but it wassn’t there.
October 8th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
This post made me involuntarily cringe.
October 8th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
the original had ‘Foriegn’ instead of ‘Foreign’ in the phrase “I think that our foreign policy effects the situation”
that’s what was fixed basically.
October 8th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Do you think that the original will become valuable, like a type on a baseball card? I definitely have a copy if anyone wants to shoot me some paypal for it!
October 8th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Usualy -> usually
Clever…
October 8th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
This is why I type everything important in Microsoft Word — I don’t have to go through all the tedious right-clicks of Firefox spellcheck. Autocorrect = secretly my god.
October 8th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
This post has grammar errors in addition to spelling errors. Were those intentional? I want them to be, considering the comic is about grammar nazis.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Rule 1 of spelling/grammar naziism: *always* double- and triple-check your comment for spelling and grammar.
Rule 2 of spelling/grammar naziism: If you make a misspelling intentionally, as a joke, someone will helpfully correct it for you. No matter how obvious the joke is.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
mr munroe, you’re just about the cleverest little boy ever.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
its funny how some of you thought he messed up on accident
October 8th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
crap, it’s (don’t hurt me!)
October 8th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
This post delivers.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Hey Mr. XKCD:
couldn’t find your email address on the site (didn’t look that hard, honestly), and I wanted to send you this link:
http://filtered.sensibleerection.com/comment.php/63597/1017380
(safe for work. i promise)
October 8th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
How’s your head?
October 8th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Hahahaha, very good. By the time I got to “acciddentaly” I thought you were drunk.
Full list: embarassing, mispelling/ed, acciddentaly, principal, usualy, schedual, recieved, lession, and humillity. I also double-checked “unknowingly”, but that’s not wrong, just unwieldy.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
This post wouldn’t have been funny if not for self-reference.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
HOLA!
It would be cool if you speled somethang with the misused letters in that post. That would have been kuintessentially awesome, but it’s possibl that I’m missusing that werd.
ADIOS!~K~
October 8th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Interestingly enough, I had the old version in my cache, so I quickly saved it before refreshing to check it out. For those who were interested, it basically appears as though he took the “E” and the “I” and switched them in Photoshop or something similar; they look identical to those in the original.
Oh, and has anyone caught “lession” yet?
October 8th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Been reading you for a year now? Excellent job, etc, but I remember reading the comic first, and afterwards, paging through my blog roll I came across:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004997.html
I think Foriegn was funnier :).
October 8th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Brilliant. So many people owning themselves here. :D
October 8th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
i wonder if mr munroe will open this page with popcorn at the ready? or perhaps he’s trying a variation on his own challenge posed in comic 301…
October 8th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Mr. Munroe, I am one of the people who have a English degree. You make hour kind happy. You’re humor is much apreciated. :)
October 9th, 2007 at 4:01 am
Sir, I must request you stop snooping my AIM chat logs for XKCD content. Do so again and I shall be forced to assume a writing credit.
Seriously. My friend Kia and I were discussing this very issue likely not more than an hour before this panel went up. Therefore, not only did you snoop our conversation, you acted so hastily on that newfound source of content that you forwent proper spell checking, leading to this embarrassing typo. Such are your just deserts.
;)
October 9th, 2007 at 5:03 am
I see what you did there.
October 9th, 2007 at 8:31 am
Welcome to my pain :P
I have a terrible problem with It’s and Its.
October 9th, 2007 at 9:30 am
What makes me really sad about this post is that I hardly noticed any mistakes because I’ve been speaking only German for the last three months (I’m an American exchange student in Germany).
Oh well.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:44 am
I’ve found that anytime I correct someone’s spelling or grammar, in that utterance I make an error. I think we have a wee module in the brain that punishes other modules in the brain for trying to be too clever.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
I don’t think anyone else got “schedual” -> “schedule”
October 9th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Oh, two others did, nevermind
October 9th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
You left out that you misspelled “Excused” as “xkcd”.
October 9th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Randall is tee-hee-heeing uncontrollably right now, I’m sure.
One that hasn’t been specifically mentioned yet: “I’d” means “I would”, not “I had”.
October 9th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Since the comic is hand-written, it’s not a typo.
October 9th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Actually, Erik, I’d can mean both I would or I had.
This leads to brilliant fun with the statement “I’d not run,” among others.
October 9th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Bravoe! Well done.
October 9th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Heh. Nice.
October 9th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
I didn’t consciously notice anything until I got to “schedual”, and then I realised how much my pedddant’s hindbrain had been tickling as I read. It’s like I have spell-check as a permanent low-priority process running somewhere behind and between my earlobes. Trouble is, so many bloggers think informal = clumsy, and don’t bother to check their prose before they launch it upon the intertubes (sorry - *teh* intertubes; my bad), so the process gets throttled back a bit when I’m reading blogs. I’ll remember not to let that happen when I’m reading this one…
October 10th, 2007 at 1:12 am
‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’
or when sounded as ‘A’, as in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh’.
Albeit, there’s weird words like ‘leisure’ and ‘neither’
(’foreign’ and ‘counterfeit’ don’t make sense either).
‘Seismic’ and ’seisure’ and ‘protein’ and ‘height’…
…the rule is quite useless but possibly might
just yet be worth saving with some alteration:
(oops: ‘heir’, ‘their’, and ’sovereign’… ‘decaffeination’…)
so yes it’s quite simple, as I’m sure you can see:
“‘I’ before ‘E’ when it wants to be!”
[The first 2 lines are from my grade school English textbook. I made up the rest.]
October 10th, 2007 at 2:05 am
That post made me twitch. I eventually laughed once I realized it was intentional, though it was markedly uncomfortable laughter.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:52 am
I cownted 9 speling erorrs. How mini did evryone ellse get? :)
October 10th, 2007 at 3:14 am
just wanted to say the comic is great, especially todays
October 10th, 2007 at 5:18 am
And yet! Even with all the spelling errors! WE STILL UNDERSTOOD HIM. Wow. The facility of language.
In other words, language prescriptivists, chill out.
October 10th, 2007 at 7:28 am
I have to admit that not only did I fail to spot the mistake in the comic, I also completely missed every single error in that post aswell, I’m so proud! I think a lot of the time you see what you expect to see, not what is actually there, I wasn’t expecting mistakes so I didn’t see any. Of course there is also the fact that my spelling is appalling, hooray for spellcheckers!
October 10th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Actually the typo made a lot of sense. :) And was funnier that way. :)
October 10th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Mrak: I ocne raed an aticrle wichh dmonteesartd that minxig up all but the frist and lsat lertets of a wrod did nihontg to atler its radeiblitay.
October 10th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
You really should have spelled Grammar as [incorrectly] Grammer. Would have been awesome.
October 11th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Lession?
Lesson?
Lesion?
Deliberate asshole?
Seriously great comic.
Glad to see wetriffs has some photos up now.
October 11th, 2007 at 6:22 am
i thought you spelled it foriegn on purpose. i am sadder now.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:41 am
can you tell where your comic ends and your life starts? :)
October 11th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Mers: note similar On a, I forum sentences once randomized in order in of post the a words. understood I’m whether sure anyone not.
October 12th, 2007 at 3:47 am
Kyzentun- well, in this post I understood perfectly. It only works with shorter sentences and simpler ideas though. If it gets too convoluted you lose audience comprehension.
Actually you can mix up the letters within a word and as long as there are approximately the right number of them and more or less the correct letters themselves, and the first and last letter are correct, it’s pretty easy to read. Some university did a study on it once.
The way we actually read is fascinating.
October 12th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Now I understand where your grammar nazi comics come from.
October 12th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Where’s the porn? I can’t find it anywhere!
October 12th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
He spelled “weird” correctly. If that doesn’t indicate that the typos are intentional, nothing does. ‘Cause nobody with spelling problems can ever get “weird” right.
October 15th, 2007 at 1:53 am
There seems to be another “embarassing” typo in today’s Turing Test comic. Wouldn’t this tactic be going after the “testers” (the examiners), not the “test-ees” (the AI)? What makes it extra embarrassing is that the term that Randall used sounds like part of the male anatomy (flashback to students trying to say “organism”).
October 15th, 2007 at 7:24 am
I marvel at the many layers of stupidity/sarcasm in the internet. I will never be able to decide which is used in a particular part. I suppose accuracy in distinguishing comes down to one’s interpretation of a half-empty/half-full glass.
October 16th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
People think their so wity.
October 17th, 2007 at 6:10 am
I always hope on the inside that everyone is secretly joking.
Unfortunately, it seems extremely likely that DJ wasn’t.
October 17th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
DAMN! I’ve been thinking that all of your misspellings were some sort of stenography. I’ve been making a list of all of the misspelled words in the comics to try and decrypt it! No wonder it wasn’t making sense.
October 17th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
i heart your comic
October 18th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
As long as you can manage to avoid mixing up “erotic” and “erratic”, I think you’re going to be fine. :-D
At least, you’ll be one step ahead of me.
…Weirdest conversation with my grandmother EVAR.
October 19th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Socially rejected nerds such as myself are still slaves to its rules. Ironic.
On the plus side, all these people who corrected your grammar and spelling consider you their teacher. Hence their desperate attempts to impress you by showing you just how many mistakes you make. Congratulations.
-Mekon
October 21st, 2007 at 7:03 am
No spelling mistake is ekscusable. Also unacceptable are the shoccing inkorrect uses of “Its” and “It’s”. Fint the message?
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:43 am
on principal I usualy don’t edit comics after the first few minutes they’ve been up, but most of the time I’m around when they do.
—
Laurie points out in http://blag.xkcd.com/2007/10/08/embarassing-typo/#comment-9853 that there are grammar errors, but doesn’t point them out. Nobody seems to have noticed that this sentence simply doesn’t make any sense.
October 24th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
wow, these people need to get off their high horses and get a joke instead.
October 24th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
There are many comments here about the spelling errors in the post, but none yet about the mistakes in grammar. I spotted at least one:
> I’ve corrected it — on principal I usualy don’t edit comics after the first few minutes they’ve been up, but most of the time I’m around when they do.
October 26th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Even though he corrected the mistake in the comic, I like to think that he was being ironic. Kind of like that Allanis Morysett song “Ironic”(I just murdered the spelling of her name btw). None of the things she mentions in the song are actually ironic, which I guess could be seen as ironic, since she made a song that implied irony when there was never any involved.
I’m not sure if that makes any sense, or if I used irony in its correct form. It’s annoying when people misuse that word isn’t it?
October 28th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
You accidentally spelled “Confession” correctly!
October 31st, 2007 at 4:53 pm
I think most of you fell into the trap. ;-)
November 1st, 2007 at 3:17 pm
This page of comments reminds me of an antlion pit
November 3rd, 2007 at 1:27 pm
No, actualy, “I’d” can mean either I would or I had. It’s not resrticted to either meaning.
November 4th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
one more…
recieving -> receiving ;)
I before E except after E. ;D
November 4th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
now, how did that work. I before E except after C, more like..
November 5th, 2007 at 3:39 am
Umm, Jesin? You spelt “actually” wrong.
Please tell me you were joking.
November 5th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Yes… Please do not point out the obvius.
–The Management.
November 7th, 2007 at 4:39 am
good thing I’m not a native speaker, so I didn’t notice the mistakes in this entry until I starting reading the comments.
November 8th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Ha!
“Schedual” was the only one to hit my radar.
My worst offense has always been “definate”.
Fortunately firefox now has spell check, or offense would have been a problem too.
Just found out about your comic a month ago from a coworker and was compelled to view the whole collection. Good stuff. Thanks for the free thoughtful entertainment. I really appreciate the style.
- D
November 14th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
In the comic number 342 you also mondegreened (I have deliberately coined this verb form). It’s “like a-ringing a bell”, not “like a ring in a bell”, which would be a very odd simile to say the least.
November 15th, 2007 at 7:40 am
Heh. I’ll bet you don’t even know the difference between affect and effect! :-)
December 7th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
That hurt to read. My eyes are cringing now, thanks.
December 14th, 2007 at 4:03 am
Humility is overrated, anyway. Who wants to be humile? Sounds like a disease.
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:23 am
For a verbal equivalent of such hilarious stuff-ups, try “The Education of Hyman Kaplan” by E B White. Takes some beating!
January 15th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Sammy_J:
It’s “steganography”
February 9th, 2008 at 5:23 am
Sad thing is, I automatically read straight through almost all (except “lession”) the ‘typos’ because I’d just been viewing youtube comments.
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