My kids love Failblog, which simply shows a photo of something gone horribly, or even just marginally, wrong.
It could be a goat twirling by its horns on a wire fence, an electrical box in the side of a shower stall, or an unintentionally rude headline.
I would be the perfect person to work on Fail Blog, Proofreading Edition. I’m already practicing.
Yesterday I snapped this photo in the Swarthmore PA Co-Op.
Although I tried to be sly about it, there was a clerk standing in that very aisle, and I couldn’t outwait her. So when she saw me taking the photo, she expressed curiosity. I said “Well, there’s a typo.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Stationary should be spelled with an E. I noticed that when they first put the sign up.”
I pressed, “You must get tired of people pointing out the mistake. I mean, this IS Swarthmore PA,” I was thinking, “All those Prius-driving professors, students, Quakers, lawyers and 501-C3 types who live in town must constantly comment on how humiliating it is to have a glaring typo in the ville’s one and only grocery store.”
“No,” she responded. “You and I are the only ones who seem to have noticed.”
I don’t know whether to be proud of my perspicaciousness or chagrined by my persnickitivity.
Recently, my friend Donna sent me a link to a blog that features photos of signs with out of control quotation marks.
And someone else has a smash hit of a blog called Cake Wrecks which is solely devoted to typos and misadventures in icing.
So maybe there’s a market for my misspelling blog. Actually I’m sure someone has already beaten me to it.
As my boys would say, “Epic Fail.”
