The Predictive Power of Mistakes

If you make one, it is likely that someone else has made the same mistake, in a more important setting. Take, for example, a common search and replace in an html page. If you have a bunch of <div> tags, and you want to replace them with more semantically correct <p> tags, you might do a search and replace for \”p\” to replace \”div\”. This would be a mistake if, say, your page was about a certain section of a hospital or about the earnings of your site or about a mathematical formula, resulting in these sorts of quotes:

  • \”Retained earnings are profits reinvested in the business rather than paid out as pidends.\”
  • \”Dr. Sugarbaker is Chief of the pision of Thoracic Surgery at Brigham & Women's Hospital.\”
  • \”As a guide, spa capacity in litres pided by daily bathers pided by 12 is a good formula.\”
  • \”…pergence or Convergence in the Light of Europeanization\”
  • \”A 401(k) can persify its investments and offer participants a variety of choices, including company stock.\”
  • \”One of the most interesting things about the World Wide Web is its persity in information.\”
  • \”Bill Clinton stated that Republicans were piders and not a uniting party…\”
  • \”Crazed or pinely inspired, the 17-year-old peasant girl presented herself to the Dauphin…\”
  • \”…to watching my mom raise two young children as a porced parent in the 1970s…\”

Unfortunately, too many people misspell Persian and purge; pest, pine, pining, and ping are all fairly common words; Pisor is a name; other words, like divulged, aren't common enough that the possibility missed them. But there are plenty of possiblities, just in the <div> != <p> error. You would expect that republicans are spiders, but it's more obscure than that. I really wonder what a persity is.

Can you find any more?


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