Tag: repetition

Super Mario and Hitler

I went to GenCon last week and have been thinking a lot about games, so what better time to bring you a trio of game-related typos?

Our first howler comes from New Super Mario Bros. 2, a recent release for the Nintendo 3DS. The Mario games are extremely popular across all Nintendo game systems, so this isn’t exactly a tiny error in an obscure product that no one will ever see.

No, Mario, I don’t want to click OK! That implies my acceptance of the typo hovering right above the button! (The above image is a screenshot I took of a short video that documents the error, proving it isn’t a fake.)

Our second typo is also from the New Super Mario Bros. 2 game, this time from the manual. (Yeah, yeah, I know—errors in an instruction manual? The devil you say!)

According to the note below the cute diagram, co-op play requires two Nintendo 3DS systems, two game cards, and two game cards. Is that Nintendo’s sneaky way of saying you need to buy four game cards? (The above image comes from this article that documents the typo.)

Let’s give poor Mario a break now and turn to our third typo, which comes from the world of Major League Baseball. I can’t improve on the title of the article where I found this typo, so I’ll just echo it here: There are closed captioning typos, and then there’s calling Carlos Pena “Hitler.”

It’s nice to know that Godwin’s law holds even in baseball games. (By the way, the expression on Pena’s face above is crying out for a “WTF?” thought bubble to be Photoshopped above his head.)

Thanks to the GRAMMARGEDDON! readers who alerted me to some of these mistakes. And if you see anything worth spotlighting on the blog, feel free to send it in. Your efforts will be also be appreciated.

Number 2 in a series?

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!

Can you spot the the typo?

You’ve probably heard about how easy it is to miss a repeated word when it appears at the end of a line and the beginning of the next line. For example:

“Wow,” he said. “I had no idea how easy it is to miss a word when it appears at the
the end of a line and also at the beginning of the next line!”

When you’re reading quickly, your mind just absorbs the repetition as a way of maintaining the continuity of what you’re reading.

I’d like to think that’s what happened with the ad shown below, which ran on the back cover of a magazine. (I blurred out the name of the race.) This might just be the most egregious editing mistake I’ve ever seen make it to print. And since I’ve been in the editing biz for a long time, that’s really saying something.

Got any better—uh, I mean, worse examples? Send ’em in to the blog.

Then again, maybe the copywriter really, REALLY likes the 1980s song "This Is the Day."