Why newspapers need human editors.

I spotted this rather startling headline in today's Sacramento Bee:

Top Democrat Dicks to retire

Alas, my hopes were dashed when I discovered it referred only to US Congressman Norm Dicks, a prominent member of the Democratic party, who is, apparently, every inch the gentleman.

BRITISH PUSH BOTTLES UP GERMANS was a good one.

I have been assured it appeared in a British newspaper late in World War 2 when a British advance (or "push") in NW Europe surrounded - bottled up - a large number of German troops.

Along the lines of OP's, I was once startled to see "Jews named to Choice Hotels board" in the local paper.

It was a guy named William Jews.

There are innumerable such headlines. Whilst no doubt some of them are oversights, I've always presumed that many of them result from someone, probably a junior, was having a laugh, seeing if they could get it past someone higher up. And that applies not just to double entendres, but especially to those numerous mispronts which by extraordinary chance, if indeed they were random mispronts, turn out to mean something funny.

And that applies not just to double entendres, but especially to those numerous mispronts which by extraordinary chance, if indeed they were random mispronts, turn out to mean something funny.

Yeah, those random mispronts get you every time.

One of my favorite mispront stories has to do with Mark Twain. I'll paste an old post of mine:

Twain was apprenticed to a printer when he was 12 or 13--some time around 1840, I think. One day, a visitng preacher gave a ripsnorter of a sermon and a local minister commissioned a printing of it. This took several apprentices many hours to typeset. When they were all done, the head apprentice ran a proof and discovered a word was missing. This would require resetting almost all the type.

The head apprentice figured out that instead of resetting the whole thing, if he changed a "Jesus Christ to "J. C.," he could slip in the missing word. He figured the minister would never notice.

Well, the minister read his proof sheet and hit the ceiling. "So long as you live, don't you ever diminish your Saviors' name again. Put it all in," he thundered.

So the head apprentice did just that. He changed the "J. C." to "Jesus H. Christ."

The Columbia Jounalism Review collects them. Not real gold in that current crop, though.

The previous edition http://www.cjr.org/the_lower_case/the_lower_case_novdec2011.php has one particularly honest mispront, "Readers: We invent your comments and criticisms." But it is a perfect example of the kind of thing I suspect to be someone's deliberate joke.

However I do feel reasonably sure that on the occasion that a colleague sent out a Draft Report, and he being the author himself labelled it as such watermarked across every page in inch-high text, but omitting the first R, that must surely have been an accident.

I suspect that "we invent your comments" can be laid at the feet of a spellchecker. Someone typed invnte or something and clicked on the first proposed correction.

I think one problem these days is over-reliance on spellcheckers, grammar checkers, and other computer stuff. Not like them olden days when you pulled a proof and actually looked at it.

There is an attested incidence of a deliberate insertion of an obscenity in an 1882 edition of The Times (London). Harcourt Interpolation. There is also an unverified story where Queen Victoria crossed some bridge (bridge name varies in different stories). A paper meant to print that she "passed over the bridge." Depending on the version of the story, the typesetter either deliberately or accidentally altered the verb.

yuuuuuuhc [this is not a typo. It was deliberately typed by my cat while I was off making myself a cup of tea].

nutrax, we don't know whether that's a typo or not. Depends on what the cat wanted to say.

Based on how I would pronounce that word, I believe it means "I am about to produce a hairball."

Well, you're probably right then. Not a typo.

How about a headline in a local Bedfordshire paper....

"New Landlord Is All Smiles, As He Finally Gets The Cock Inn"

Priceless.