{"id":334,"date":"2008-08-24T12:00:01","date_gmt":"2008-08-24T18:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/six-thousand-dollars-to-correct-eleven-misspellings\/"},"modified":"2015-12-10T13:24:01","modified_gmt":"2015-12-10T19:24:01","slug":"six-thousand-dollars-to-correct-eleven-misspellings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/08\/six-thousand-dollars-to-correct-eleven-misspellings\/","title":{"rendered":"Six thousand dollars to correct eleven misspellings"},"content":{"rendered":"

I once supervised a software developer who told me that he was not an English major — and therefore had no liability to correct misspellings — when I pointed out a misspelling in an application that he was developing.<\/p>\n

His comment astounded me because spelling is a BASIC skill to me.<\/p>\n

He almost responded as if I were asking him to write a book about the history of the English language.<\/p>\n

No matter what your walk of life, the ability to spell correctly does<\/em> matter, and I plan to write some blog posts about the importance of spelling words correctly, as well as what can happen because of misspellings.<\/p>\n

Here is my first example.<\/p>\n

The city of Livermore, California, paid Miami (Florida) artist Maria Alquilar forty thousand dollars to create a sixteen-foot circular mosaic.<\/p>\n

Alquilar designed the mosaic for the Livermore public library.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the mosaic made the city famous in a bad way<\/a> because the artist originally embedded eleven misspellings in the mosaic’s tiles, including these misspellings of famous people:<\/p>\n