So we all know that typos are the worst! Terrible! They eat babies! They are AIDS! Etc, etc.
Now that that disclaimer is out there, there are some typos that I secretly love. And those are the ones that (unintentionally) completely change the meaning of the sentence because they end up being a totally different word. Those can be hilarious.
We’re all familiar with similes and metaphors, right? These can be great ways to infuse your writing with some punch and visual pizzazz. However, sometimes in the process of getting that metaphor written down, something happens, and the plane that was supposed to quickly and efficiently connect the object of your description and your metaphor ends up going all Oceanic Flight 815 on you and crashes somewhere on a remote island where weird things happen and you’re trying to get rescued, but have also kind of resigned yourself to the fact that you’re way off course and no one will be looking for you.
In other words, the last part of the previous paragraph is something you generally don’t want to do. I’m not aware of a specific literary term for a rambling or forgotten metaphor, but you generally want to avoid them.
One of my all-time favorite movies is The Usual Suspects. I could watch it on a loop, and I’d still never get sick of it. If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to spoil the ending, and if you keep reading and get mad at me, it’s your own fault because that movie has been around since 1995 and you really should have seen it by now.
The vast majority of the movie is Kevin Spacey’s con man character telling a cop about a job that results in a huge explosion and lots of deaths. He says the mastermind behind the job is a man named Keyser Soze. At the end of the movie, we learn that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze, and a good number of details from the story that he told the police were made up from things he observed in the cop’s office.
The first thing your brain does after it picks itself up off the floor is get confused: Wait—if he made up those details, what other bits of information did he make up? Was anything he just told us real? Is Keyser Soze even real?
And just like that, the movie that was so straightforward for the first 100 minutes is suddenly a completely different movie.
Thanksgiving is probably one of the bigger love-it-or-hate-it holidays of the year. If family is involved, it can be either a relaxing time to stuff your face full of tryptophan, or (and this seems more common), it’s an all-hell-breaks-loose affair, with aunts fussing in the kitchen and stressing out over the meal, uncles arguing in the TV room during the football games, little cousins running around screaming their heads off because they’ve had too much pie, and the one sane man/woman sitting in the middle of the chaos trying desperately to harness some sort of chi to keep sanity alive.
Thanksgiving is a not a dull day.
That last sentence seems like a gross understatement, right? That’s what’s known as a litote. A litote is an understatement used to underscore a greater point; in this case, the point is that in most cases, Thanksgiving is absolute insanity.
Facebook is a weird thing. It’s nice because it allows you to keep tabs on who from high school has gotten engaged/pregnant/fat, but it also brings out some of the worst spelling and grammar I’ve ever seen.
When you meet someone who might be the future love of your life, and you add them on Facebook, what are they going to think when they see that you don’t type out the whole word “you” in your status updates, or worse, when they see you used the wrong your/you’re? That’s going to ruin your future chances at marrying them, and then you’re not going to share that beautiful mountain cabin with your two Bernese Mountain Dogs, and you can definitely forget about raising your kids Denver and Dakota in a way that will encourage them to be responsible for their actions while still reminding them that you will always be there for them. You blew it with that misapplied space in “under neath”.
So please, don’t make these mistakes. You know, for the kids.
