Regular readers of this blog might remember a magazine ad I ran that contained a gotta-see-it-to-believe-it typo. Well, I recently found myself forced to flip through the Crate & Barrel summer catalog (since it was the only reading material available near the, er, place where I was sitting), and the very first page that I happened to look at contained the same typo, albeit in a smaller font.

Just like in the other magazine ad, the people responsible for this error can’t fall back on the excuse that it’s easy to miss a repeated word that occurs at the end of one line and the beginning of the next line (which is true, by the way). And most spellcheckers catch repeated words, so apparently this copy wasn’t subjected to even that lowly level of care.

For the record, I’d also hyphenate “powder-coated” (as they did, correctly, with “Weather-resistant”). However, the trend these days is to close up compounds, so I won’t hold it against them. I mean, yeah, I think they’re wrong in this case, but their hearts were in the right place. And at least they didn’t have “powder coated” as two separate words.

So now I’ve found two recent instances of “the the” in print. Is this the beginning of a series? Stay tuned to find out!