When Thin Letters Vanish…
Or: Don't make a pubic spectacle of yourself
‘Spellchecker won’t notice if you’ve left the l out of public,’ I used to warn my students at essay submission time.
A brief pause while they worked it out, then some polite chuckles.
It was a joke, but it was backed up by experience. In a decade marking essays in the Theatre and Performance Studies fields, I encountered that particular typo more times than you’d expect. I read about pubic entertainments, pubic spaces, pubic protests and pubic spectacles.
(That last was the one that broke my composure, by the way. My mischievous brain connected spectacles with eyewear, triggering one of the finest fits of giggles ever to beset an academic during working hours.)
These days, Grammar Check will flag up most unwarranted pubics. But that’s no reason to relax. Not all writing is done in MS Word and, essays aside, final proofs are seldom in that format.
And the l’s keep vanishing.
It’s thin letters that disappear most frequently. Especially when they’re next to other thin letters. That lower-case l in public, tucked beside a similarly narrow i and flanked by attention-grabbing, bulbous b’s and c’s… the eye knows that there should be something skinny there, so it accepts the i and fails to notice that the l has slipped away.
The second i in millionaire is another recurrent runaway. Four tall, narrow letters in a row – that takes some keeping track of. Our reading instincts tell us to expect two dotted i’s, but millonaire provides a decoy and we often fall for it.
Sometimes they slip in somewhere else instead, like arthiritis. That one’s usually a spelling error, not a typo, but it gets away with it for very similar reasons: the thin imposter i squashed in between the h’s leg and the r’s back, with two more decoy i’s appearing later in the word…
They’re tricky, thin letters.
They need careful watching, or they’ll make a pubic spectacle of you.
Want help watching them? You know what to do! Call the Proofs Detective: your private contact in the Missing Letters Bureau.
Hoping to hear from you…
Sincerely Yours,
The Proofs Detective
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