typos
unhinged typos shmypos dear
we all have them from time to time
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lostgirl one too many glasses of chardonnay left my fingers in tangles.


thanks though.

the imperfect perfectionist~that's me.
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raze fingers and brain
lovers estranged
would that they could
close the gap
and enfold each other
in the warmth of shared purpose
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raze misspell the latin
stare at the lantern
end as you meant to begin
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raze i guess that's what i get for blathing first thing in the morning. 130211
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raze eye still keep mayking theez. gawd, wye? 130423
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raze it's frustrating when you get to a point where most of the typos you're making are a side effect of your laptop slowly breaking down and certain keys no longer responding as competently as they once did. if i had the extra money to buy a mac, i would, and then i'd throw this thing against the wall as hard as i could and be done with it.

of course, the first thing i ever blathed with the new laptop would contain a typo i would somehow fail to see until it was too late. i'm sure of it. such is life. such is the nature of typos. they're like ants. you can stomp on as many of them as you like, but someday another one will come crawling along.
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raze stomp
stomp

S
T
O
M
P
!
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raze i've been a lot better at weeding them out lately, but every once in a while complacence gives me a little nibble on the tush. like a bad penny, the typos always come back.

wait a minute...they've phased pennies out...WHAT WILL I DO WITH ALL MY PENNIES NOW?! GOD! WHAT?! WHY?! WHO?!
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e_o_i You can roll them up in those little rolls, 50 cents a roll, and deposit them at the bank. Or you can pave a miniature rock garden.

I guess "lign" follows the same logic as "sign." And there was "repayed" somewhere else. It's hard with the ones that look right(ish).
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raze i like the idea of paving a miniature rock garden. 130811
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raze damn you, typos. damn you right in the goddamn ear you don't goddamn have. 131015
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gab worse when the auto correct feature commits the crime unbeknownst to the writer and goes undetected until after pushing the blather button 131018
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e_o_i Canada Writes writes:

"We want the stories you tell at parties and at dinners with friends. When your family gets together, what stories are retold? Do you have a colourful aunt or uncle? How did your grandmother come upon her pasta recipe? What trouble did you and your bother get into growing up?"

My bother and I never got into trouble. We were very well behaved.
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e_o_i I also got an email inviting me to a Chrisymas party. I quite like that one. 131201
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raze i kind of like it when people type "defiantly" where they mean to type "definitely". it bends the meaning of what they're saying in some interesting directions. 140131
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raze hypothetical example:

"i defiantly love you."

do you really now?
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raze maybe i need to start typing nonsense words so typos can't happen anymore. you can't spell something wrong when there's no right way to spell it to begin with.

garkmanjaflazz. spinchmoof. TREHIFFKOOLARRRR!

there. i feel better now.
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e_o_i One of my former profs talked about the issue of typos in Finnegans Wake. The problem: how can you tell? 140327
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raze i guess every relatively typo-free streak is doomed to end somedayit's too bad this one had to grind to a halt with a boneheaded mistake like "leant" in place of "lent".

blather: making everyone better at proofreading since 1998.
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e_o_i They're/there/their is hardly ever a problem for me, but I'm terrible with to/two/too. 140826
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nr a friend of mine always makes typos that are the opposite of what she's trying to type. a lot of "are" instead of "aren't" or "is" instead of "isn't." i guess maybe those aren't exactly typos, but they make it necessary to read those parts over again to make sure i understand the meaning.

she usually types the positive to replace the negative (never "aren't" instead of "are"). i wonder if freud would have anything to say about that.
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flux since taking up linguistics, i've noticed that at least some of my typos are phonetic, e.g. d/t and p/b. which has interesting implications, though i'm not sure i started making these typos before i studied linguistics. 140827
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e_o_i Me too, flux. Not that I've studied linguistics (apart from a bit of Saussure & Chomsky with the old EngLit), but I'll sometimes write, not even the wrong homophone, but a word that's phonetically similar ("think" instead of "thing," for example). I guess that isn't a typo, because it's usually when I'm writing on paper.

I guess the strict definition of a typo is just hitting the wrong letter. But I wonder, like nr wrote, how mind-revealing even those are? There's an ostensible student essay sentence in Richard Lederer's Anguished English that goes, "When a boy and girl are deeply in love, there is no quilt felt between them" - quilt for guilt. I'm not sure I trust all the mistakes in that book. (That's a funny phrase, "I'm not sure I trust all the mistakes.") Someone could have made it up just to be funny. Faked mistakes, for the lulz.
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e_o_i I wrote "my misstree" instead of "by misstree" somewhere here... I guess I did have a bit of a blather_crush on her at one point, even if the diss/missed me once as someone who didn't Take Literature Seriously. 140827
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e_o_i ...By "the" I meant "she." Self-demonstrating, blah! ;) 140827
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e_o_i I just turned "golf course" into "gold course" - trying to make a boring writing assignment more exciting? 140831
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raze i somehow found a way to miss an l in "llama". but! a lama is a real thing too. so i'll pretend i meant to type that instead. 140902
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raze note_to_self: there is no a in "leeching". 150220
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raze (or there is, but not in the kind you're thinking of) 150220
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flux blue::llama 150808
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raze do missing words count as typos? because FUCK THEM TOO. inspired BY, goddamnit. INSPIRED BY. HOW DID I MISS THE BY WHY OH WHY TOO SHY SHY HUSH HUSH. 150810
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raze more annoying when they happen less often, because, because, because. 150904
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nr i pretty much make a living correcting them. it turns out it's not as fulfilling as you may think. 151215
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raze maybe the most ridiculous-but-amusing typo of my life:

"should we get together and tap kabout the mysteries of life?"
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raze they is coming to be reeking hammocks with me. all my tenses have failure in their bones, tall talons sketching out a skitter on a brick wall, going, "skrunk, skrunk, skrunk." i try to be catching them all ways, but someone, some sneaky someone always makes a brake for it and gets a way. just yesterday there was this, on early_crushes_take_two: "i remember the way the crushed stones beneath our feet making the basketball skip away from us after every shot." and i thought, "all i had to do was change 'making' to 'made' or delete 'the way'. there were two ways to make this work, and i missed them both. why?!"

one of brian_eno's_oblique_strategy_cards says, "honour thy error as a hidden intention." those are good words to live with, but i'm sure they've got bad habits too. and i bet brian_eno never had to deal with a typo a day in his life. he just set up some elaborate chain of studio effects, this expensive digital reverb into that analog delay into that subtle chorus, into these, into those, and whatever typo he made came out sounding like something off of "ambient 4: on land".
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unhinged sometimes
freudian slips
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raze true words. freudian_typos are definitely a thing. 210809
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tender square there's at least two in every post, always. i've come to expect it.

my aim for the error-free blathe reminds me of glass blowers who are so close to creating the perfect piece, and then the whole thing shatters; they've learned not to aim for flawlessness, getting as close to the idea as they can is the better place to be, then they knock that hot piece off the punty and move on with their lives.

on a positive note, at least it's keeping my editing skills sharp since i'm catching them after the fact?
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tender square the perfectionist in me cringes
but with each uncovered typo, I wonder
if the greater the flaws,
the closer the piece is
to capturing something vital.
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raze i'm going to start telling myself this.

(i don't think i'll ever not wince when i think about letting "hold close you" sneak through all those years ago, but at last that sort of thing has made me a more careful proofreader.)
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raze and here i go making my first blather typo in a good few weeks while patting myself on the back for being a better proofreader these days. ha!

at_least
at_last
these_webs_we_weave
make_something_good
with_and_without_beast_and_beauty.
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raze at.
not and.
at.
not and.
at. at. at.
at ate and
and made it and
instead of at.
and that's where it's at.
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raze when you spend a long time writing something, you work to get it just right, you proofread the shit out of it, and then you hit the "blather" button and you see one word is missing.

one. goddamn. word.

ain't that fun?
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tender_square whoppers galore even though i proofread. evidently not clearly enough. it always hurts worse when they're pieces you really care about. blimey. 211209
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raze what fucking good are the stupid fucking wavy red lines in your browser that are supposed to point out words you've misspelled when they underline words that *are* spelled correctly but neglect something like "neigbour"? and how the fuck did i miss that h after proofreading?

this is the kind of shit that makes me never want to write anything again. ugh.
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kerry i don’t think i’ve ever written a blathe that didn’t have some kind of typo. even when i read it beforehand, as carefully as i try, there is inevitably one. hell, there’s probably a typo in here somewhere. i’m caring less and less. 211221
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raze i'm really glad to hear that, because your writing is so great it annihilates any typos that might sneak through and leaves them hanging their heads in quiet reverence (or, typo style: quite reverence). i just feel a need to vent about this stuff once in a while, for all the good it does. misspelling a word i know how to spell (and pell) is one of the few things that sometimes makes me wish we could edit at least our own blathes.

i guess it's one of the pitfalls of morning_blathing. some things are bound to slip through the cracks when this old brain is still thawing out and the ice is at its most vulnerable.
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kerry sheesh, thanks raze. vent away--it's good for ya.
the other day i finished a blathe and then thought of a title for it that i actually liked, instead of a title just for necessity, and i had that same feeling--i wished i could edit it!
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tender_square well, now i just went and made a mess of it. i misblathed a title—A TITLE!

it should be "lessons_from_snowmelt" not "lesons_from_snowmelt"

excuse me, while i internally cringe forever. fuuuuuuuuuck.
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tender_square today is the day where i spelled "laughing" wrong. i'm not laughing. 220320
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raze some advice_to_past_self_from_future_you: "pst time" is redundant. there's no such thing as "time time", though there *is* a time-time.net. either stick with "pst" and leave it alone, or drop the abbreviation and write "pacific standard time". 220325
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epitome of incomprehensibility Editing, seeing that I'd written "somewhat grabbed my arm." SomeONE.

It's my Christian karma for mentally turning up my nose at B. the boss for saying "somehow" when he means "somewhat."
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raze amusing: typing "fast foot restaurant" instead of "fast food restaurant" in a word document no one is ever going to read.

not as amusing: somehow missing the n in "friend" even after proofreading, and having that mistake preserved for all of eternity in the twelfth addition to a blathe you've been building for five months now.

F%^#&$*.
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tender_square i just managed to spell my sister's name wrong...in a blathe with her name.

(oh, the humanity.)
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raze thanks, "is", for going missing when i needed you most, in the smallest of poems, where your absence would be most visible. for being just two letters long, you're a pretty big asshole when you want to be. 220501
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raze i guess i was due to drop one in a blathe i cared about.

still. FUCK YOU.
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raze i can't decide if the grammatical ones are more or less frustrating than missed words and simple misspellings.

maybe it's a tie.
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tender_square the worst is when you see the squiggly red underline under a word in the white box only *after* you've pressed "blather," knowing as it loads that it's far too late to take it back. 221109
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tender_square i don't even bother correcting them after i see what i've done on red anymore. they frustrate the hell out of me, but i refuse to footnote an update. 221130
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past i can't stop making them. it's like my fingers are forgetting how to spell despite three plus decades of practice. 221214
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past oh man, i realized i changed the first speakers name in openings halfway through. not really a typo though. 221214
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epitome of incomprehensibility Browsing blather, I read through this, all laid-back, thinking, "What's the big deal about typos, anyway?"

...And then, a scarce half-hour later, getting mad at myself for changing "the" to "te" in an email. Nothing suggestive or incomprehensible. I'm just mad that it isn't *right*.
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tender_square i misblathed my SOTD. WHY?!? 230216
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past they're hard to avoid when you have a baby in one hand and blather in the other. i count at least 4 in moon ouff. 230316
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tender_square "took me a home" on "typha."

what am i, a mario brother?
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tender_square a typo in a blathe title. oh, the humanity.

"hearding" should've been "herding."

(in the words of homer simpson, "d'oh!")
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e_o_i This one is more of me writing a completely nonsensical word for the context: before catching my error, I posited that some Kassel_graffiti was about "whether Germany should or shouldn't get involved in the Ukraine/Montreal war."

I...wasn't aware Montreal was fighting with Ukraine. I'm not sure that's a fight we could win.
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raze not here, but elsewhere, "i run inside to grab some more" somehow became "i run inside to grab someone". 230716
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tender_square i came across the cutest typo while editing resumes for my colleagues in construction. a plumber mistakenly but also perfectly wrote that he was well-versed in many "faucets" of the industry. 230720
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raze "know way of knowing."

(typo, know thyself.)
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tender_square it's pretty shitty when you can't spell shittiness right.

(see "milk_of_human_shitiness")
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e_o_i In an email: "Octover."

Sounds like a cool month, though.
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raze i typed "must" instead of "nuts".

i don't even know, man.
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