I admit it — I’m a lousy proofreader. This was especially embarrassing when I worked in the publishing business, editing a magazine on Disney collectibles. It seemed every issue had something misspelled or misquoted.

But I’ve found some comfort in a recent article on the Dictionary;Scoop website. Entitled “The 10 Funniest Mistakes, Typos, And Misprints In History,” I would agree that the examples they selected are definitely mistakes, although I’m not so sure about the funny part.

For example, a missing mathematical symbol in a spacecraft’s code cost NASA almost 80 million dollars in 1962. The victimized spacecraft overcorrected its trajectory, went off course, and had to be destroyed. (Is this another case of the formula Tragedy + Time = Comedy?)

Then there was a comma that was supposed to be a hyphen in the 13th Tariff Act in 1872. The Act included a list of items exempt from taxation, but “fruit-bearing plants” somehow became “fruit, plants tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.” Thus, all fruit had to be considered exempt from the tariff. The estimated cost in lost revenue was something over 40 million dollars.

But there are instances that are more benign. In December 2017, a Cambridge newspaper had a headline that read “100PT SPLASH HEADING HERE.” As one might guess, this was a layout instruction that was somehow ignored. The mistake was blamed on a “technical issue.” I can sympathize; I’ve done the same thing for photo captions.

The editor of a website I’ve written for always ended his correspondence with the tagline “Proofreading Never Ends.” I agree wholeheartedly.

The complete list can be found at https://www.dictionaryscoop.com/article/The-10-Funniest-Mistakes-Typos-And-Misprints-In-History?. And please ignore any typos in this article.