Typos that reverse meaning

Filed under: Errors
1 Comment

It’s fairly common for a writer to accidentally leave out the word not and thereby write the opposite of what they intended.

But I feel like it’s less common for other kinds of typos to result in a reversal of meaning.

I just came across one:

It was an intense feeling of fatherless.

Based on context, I think that was meant to say something like fatherliness; the sentence before and the sentence after make clear that the feeling being described has to do with feeling loved and approved-of by a particular fatherly person. But dropping the in from the middle of the word turns it into its opposite.

(I came across this in Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s 2003 story “Flotsam,” as reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection.)

I welcome other examples.

One Response to “Typos that reverse meaning”

  1. Randal Divinski

    I just made such a typo and found your site while looking to see if there was a word for such a thing. My example. I meant to tell a colleague that my todo list app would keep my from forgetting to do something next week. I meant to write: “it is now there to remind me.” Instead I typed: “It is not there to remind me.”

    reply

Join the Conversation