An addition mistake in a recent article from the Idaho Freedom Foundation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We need to carefully edit what we write, even just a table with a sum of six numbers. There is an article by Fred Birnbaum at the Idaho Freedom Foundation on April 30, 2026 titled Saving money should not be a thankless task for legislators. Fred’s LinkedIn page says has an MBA, so dealing with numbers should not be a thankless task for him. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That article contains the table shown above, which I have annotated. The line for Total saved before Governor Veto is listed as $107,576,800 – but is $800 too large; it should be $107,576,000. You can easily spot that the hundreds digit is wrong, since there are two 2s and a 6 which should total to 10 rather than 8. And similarly, the Total saved after Governor Veto is listed as $107,098,200 – but it also should be $800 smaller at $107,097,400.  

 

The adding machine image came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Using a graphic to make a quote memorable – or not

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, you can use a graphic to help make a quote memorable. I could not find who M. Rose is (Mr. or Ms.?), and where he or she supposedly said that, but after 2015 when it was claimed that:

 

“You will never forget a person who came to you with a torch in the dark.”

 

Last week I saw another image for it, previously at Instagram. It had been posted by Tony DeMeo a week ago at the LinkedIn Public Speaking group. But there were two things wrong there. First, the image showed a person with a lantern rather than a torch. Second, the word person was misspelled as peson. That typo made it less memorable.  

 

The torch image was adapted from a Pearson Scott Foresman drawing at Wikimedia Commons.

 

If you don’t proofread the title of your article, then you may look very silly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editing matters. There is an article by Chauncey Devega at Salon on June 30, 2023 now titled “Far beyond simple narcissism”: Why Donald Trump can’t simply keep quiet – even when facing prison. 

 

But originally, as shown above, the word quiet was misspelled as quite, and also can be seen by looking at the URL.  

What you write is not finished until you proofread it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Gem State Patriot News blog on June 25, 2023 there is a post by Dr. John Livingston titled City Planning is Not Settled Science. His third paragraph says:

 

“The father of modern-day urban planning was John Freidman. He is revered in departments of urban planning across our country. His modern-day humanistic philosophy was centered around ‘social justice’. They are very different from Biblical Justice or theories of Entitlement ‘Equality’. He stated before his death in 2019 that they are grounded in Eastern mysticism and Chinese Marxist economic theories.”

 

But a quick Google search reveals an article by Stan Paul at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs on June 13, 2017 titled John Friedmann, the ‘Father of Urban Planning,’ dies at 91. Dr. Livingston got both his name and year of death wrong. On November 2, 2022 I blogged about how Unwillingness to proofread runs deep. And on September 11, 2020 I blogged about Editing tips for speechwriters and other writers. And back on October 4, 2017 I blogged about how What you write is not finished until you have proofread it.

 

Also, in his next to last paragraph, Dr. Livingston said:

 

“As Milton Freidman wisely opined ‘The road to hell ( with transportation nodes, and access portals to the green belt through neighborhoods—jl.) is paved with good but misinformed intentions.’ ”

 

Again, a Google search would reveal he again had swapped the first i and e in the last name, and meant to refer to the famous economist Milton Friedman.

 

Unwillingness to proofread runs deep

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you don’t check the spelling of what you’ve written, typos will make you look very foolish. Careful proofreading is needed for articles, blog posts, and PowerPoint presentations in speeches.

 

At the Gem State Patriot News on October 23, 2022 there is an article by Dr. John Livingston titled Political Grudges Run Deep. The third sentence in his third paragraph says that:

 

“Issues about self-protection, Right to Life, CRT teaching in our schools, and parenteral rights all require an application of a Providential predicate in my opinion.”

 

But what the heck are parenteral rights? The Cambridge Dictionary defines the adjective parental as:

 

“related to parents or to being a parent”

 

And they define another medical adjective, parenteral, as:

 

“relating to food or treatment that does not come through the digestive system, for example drugs that are injected into the veins or muscles”

 

I searched in the PubMed Central database at the National Library of Medicine for the phrase “parental rights” and found 926 full-text articles – but none for the phrase “parenteral rights.” One recent article by B. Isaac Gibson in the Family Court Review for July 2022 (Volume 60, number 3, pages 590 to 601) is titled The Portion of Goods That Falleth to Me: Parental rights, children’s rights, and medical decisions after COVID-19.  

 

An election is like a fruitcake when it is stollen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 On June 19, 2022 Donald J. Trump posted the following message: 

 

 

 

“The highly partisan Unselects are trying to create a FAKE narrative, for whatever reason but only with evil intention, that ‘He (me) knew he lost the election.’ This is completely false. I felt the Election was RIGGED & STOLLEN, have from the very beginning, & have only gotten stronger in that belief with time & large amounts of additional evidence and proof. In my mind I have, & HAVE HAD, NO QUESTION, and MANY people would be willing to so attest, but the Unselects don’t want to hear them…..”

 

But he added an extra ‘l’ to stolen. That transformed a verb (past participle of steal) into a noun (a sweet yeast bread of German origin containing fruit and nuts). A minute of proofreading would have caught that silly typo. He also switched from using ‘&’ to ‘and’ at the end of his next to last sentence. And he uses UNNECESSARY CAPITALIZATION so often it is pathetic.

 

Why fruitcake? He keeps trying to explain his January 6 attempted coup. On June 13, 2022 there is an article by Brett Samuels at The Hill titled Trump releases 12-page response to Jan. 6 hearing. Another by Chris Cillizza at CNN politics on June 14, 2022 is titled The 22 wildest lines from Donald Trump’s 12(!)-page statement on the January 6 committee. 

 

The image of a stollen is cropped from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Was that data aggravated or aggregated?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes I find a little gaffe that makes me laugh. At the Present Voices web site by Lee Bonvissuto there is an undated web page titled Public Speaking is Everywhere. It begins by saying that most people have trouble with impromptu speaking describing ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under a vertical bar chart with the interesting data shown above via a horizontal one, it says that:

 

“Data is aggravated from thousands of participants in my corporate workshops, along with my private clients.”

 

I think she meant to say aggregated rather than aggravated. The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition for aggravate is to make worse, more serious, or more severe; while the definition for aggregate instead is to collect or gather into a mass or whole. Perhaps she typed that page using Autocomplete software.

 

On March 16, 2022 I blogged about Five things you need to be a highly effective public speaker. In that post I linked to a series of 25 articles from Authority Magazine at Medium which also should have included this one by Lee Bonvissuto (although it incorrectly lists her first name as Leah).

 

A pyramid with aggravated data was assembled using animal numbers adapted from this one and similar ones found at Openclipart.

 

Joseph Gobbles and the Gazpacho Police

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you don’t proofread what you write, you can look very foolish – particularly when you bring up Nazis. Here in Boise the last sentence in the first paragraph of an article by Bob “Nugie” Neugebauer at the Gem State Patriot News on January 30, 2022 titled Will America Ever be Great Again? meant to bring up Joseph Goebbels but instead claimed:

 

“We have not seen propaganda like this since Joseph Gobbles in World War II.”

 

I commented:

 

“Learn to proofread. Joseph Gobbles is a name for a Thanksgiving turkey.”

 

Gestapo is an abbreviation for the notorious Gehime Staatpolozei (Secret State Police) of Nazi Germany. But recently U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene instead referred to gazpacho police. Annother article by Rick Rouan at USA Today on February 10, 2022 is titled ‘Gazpacho police’: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s word soup launches social media frenzy.  

 

The cartoon turkey was modified from an image at Wikimedia Commons.

   

Not starting at the bottom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an article by Dr. John Livingston at the Gem State Patriot News on December 4, 2021 titled WINNING “Divided WE Fall (Fail) – United We STAND” that, among other things, criticizes Governor Brad Little for his background. (His grandfather was known as the Idaho Sheep King).   

 

In seventh sentence of his second paragraph he claims that:

 

“….In any field of endeavor those who rise without starting at the bottom invariably have a sense of entitlement regarding their position, and the relationships that are so critical to developing leadership skills and savvy are never learned.”

 

But Livingston idolizes Donald J. Trump, who came from a wealthly family. An article by Kevin Breuninger at CNBC on October 2, 2018 is titled Trump claimed he turned a ‘small’ $1 million loan from his father into an empire. The New York Times say it was more like $60.7 million in loans.

 

The article ends with:

 

“What about You? MIG ‘Fight Like Hell’ ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ ”

 

MIG is a hilarious typo. He meant to say MIGA, an acronym for Make Idaho Great Again, which was most of the title of an earlier article on November 20, 2019 - Let’s Make Idaho Great Again.

Instead MIG is the acronym for the Russian Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau, best known for their Korean War jet fighter – the MIG-15.  

 

And “Let’s Go Brandon” just is a proxy slogan for the obscene “F#ck Joe Biden.”

 

Perhaps Dr. Livingston also should look in the mirror and reflect about his own background. An earlier article of his in the Gem State Patriot News on October 19, 2019 titled Diversity, Discrimination, and Discernment says he played high school football at Upper Arlington, which is a wealthy suburb of Columbus, Ohio.   

 

The image was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Bogus claims in a press release about a ‘new’ public speaking book

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On September 8, 2021 my Google Alert on the phrase “public speaking” included a press release at PR. com (and AP News) titled The Plague of Public Speaking Anxiety Has Met Its Match. It discusses a ‘new’ book by Sean Tyler Foley titled The Power to Speak Naked. That same release also appeared at PRweb with a provocative different title, Controversial book banned by Amazon now available in bookstores. But Foley’s book was NOT banned by Amazon – it appears right here, as does the previous version from 2019 (noted as a #1 bestseller).

 

The second paragraph in the press release says:  

 

“The statistics say it all. Fear of public speaking has 10% impairment on one’s wages and 15% on promotions and 90% of public speaking anxiety comes from lack of preparation. With ‘The Power to Speak Naked,’ anyone can learn to unleash the power to speak confidently and step apart from the 255 million Americans who have public speaking anxiety.”

 

Claims that public speaking fear has a 10% impairment on wages and 15% on promotions are bogus – those statistics really are for social anxiety disorder. I blogged about them in a post on December 15, 2016 titled Believable and unbelievable statistics about fears and phobias of public speaking.

 

Do 255 million Americans have public speaking anxiety? No! That number is what you get when you take 77% of the 2020 census number for the U.S. population (331,449,281 million). On October 12, 2020 I posted with the title Do 77% of Americans fear public speaking? No! That percentage described stage fright in Swedes who also had social anxiety disorder.

 

The second sentence of the press release has a typo. It says that:

 

“This was a common tip for people with stage freight(sic) to try and calm their nerves.”

 

Way back on November 12, 2009 I blogged about Stage freight and other true typos or yakwirms. Yakwirm is an acronym for You All Know What I Really Meant.

 

Don’t botch your spelling!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Typos in visual aids for a speech can occur easily. Even one wrong letter will change the meaning of a word, as is shown above where botch could become batch, bitch, or butch. The vowels U, I, and O are right next to each other on a keyboard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other examples where just changing a vowel will produce one of either three or four words are shown above. There even is a 2015 book by Kalman Toth titled 8100 One Letter Different Word Pairs: Nurture Your IQ.

 

Homophones are another spelling problem. Today’s Pearls Before Swine comic strip has Larry the Crocodile starting a new venture offering the world his opinions. At first his sign says Larry Nose, but then Zebra corrects him, and he fixes it to say Larry Knows.  

 

Watch out for misspellings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Incorrect spelling in visual aids is not good for a speaker’s credibility. Spelling errors often slip through proofreading.

 

I just saw a hilarious example in an article by Nomaan Merchant at the Associated Press on November 19, 2020 titled Trump’s election lawsuits plagued by elementary errors. It said where they should have referred to ‘poll watchers’ they instead said ‘pole watchers’ - perhaps thinking about customers at a strip club.

 

A second article by Benjamin G. Shatz in For the Defense on February 2007 titled Watch out for tricky typos mentioned lawyer mistakes of statue for statute, pubic for public, trail for trial, and untied for united.

 

A third article at Re:word titled The difference one missed letter makes says in those cases you would get asses for assess, pubic for public, and heroin for heroine.

 

Adding an extra letter also can be awful, as pointed out in a fourth article at The poke on October 14, 2017 titled ‘Best legal typo of all time. Do not stop looking til you find it’ where an extra f changed from ‘assisting’ into ‘assfisting.’ Another article by Stacy Zaretsky at Above the Law on January 10, 2018 called it The most embarrassing typo in a lawyer letter, ever.

 

The image of Miss Pellings was adapted from this photo at the Library of Congress.

 

UPDATE

 

An article at The Hill by Jordan Williams on November 26, 2020 titled Ex-Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell files lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia reported:

 

"Both of the cases filed by Powell were riddled with typographical issues. The case in Michigan had a number of formatting problems that removed spacing between words, Bloomberg reported. In the Georgia suit, the word district was misspelled twice on the first page of the document: There was an extra c for 'DISTRICCT,' and then it was spelled 'DISTRCOICT.' "

   

 

 

Glassophobia yet again

What is worse than a pseudo-technical term for fear of public speaking like glossophobia - which will send you down blind alleys when you try to search for useful information? You also could misspell it as glassophobia. That error pops up every now and then in books, web articles, and even a YouTube video.

On April 8, 2017 at Amazon there was a 100-page paperback book by Perez Dalton titled How to Be Good At Everything. Well, not really everything. On December 22, 2017 at Amazon there was another short (47-page) paperback book by Perez Dalton with an absurdly long title of How to Overcome Fear of Public Speaking (Glassophobia): Powerful Techniques for Creating Strong Social Presence, Staying Above Social Anxiety and Building Confidence.

On October 17, 2018 the Purple (mattress) web site had an article titled Sleep Guide for Anxiety which claimed:  

“The fear of public speaking (glassophobia) is still ranked alongside death as the number one fear of 20 percent of Americans.”

They linked to a blog post from the 2017 Chapman Survey of American Fears – but it actually ranked dying at #48 and public speaking at #52.  

On November 18, 2018 at Every Day Facts there was a four-minute YouTube video mistitled Glassophobia explained briefly.

And on April 6, 2019 down in South Africa at her Communicate! blog Rosanne Hurly Coyne posted on Glassophobia, and reposted on July 11, 2019 at KZN Women in Business as Glassophobia or Fear of Public Speaking.

The image of a glass being filled was modified from one by the EPA at Wikimedia Commons.

A comment with a suggestion about homophones

On June 24, 2019 I received an email from Alejandra Villalobos commenting that she had enjoyed reading my November 12, 2009 blog post titled Stage freight and other true typos or yakwirms. In that post I had linked to the English-language Wikipedia page on Homophone. Alejandra said English is not her native language, and reading Wikipedia had helped her learn.

She recommended an article by Katherine Torgersen at Website Planet on June 6, 2019 about homophones titled Are you talking aloud? Or is talking allowed? Watch what you write, to make sure it’s right. Examples there (shown with humorous illustrations)  include: chile-chili-chilly, which-witch, brake-break, bare-bear, exercise-exorcise, bear-beet, pea-pee, flea-flee, whine-wine, aisle-isle-I’ll, throne-thrown.

Linking to Wikipedia pages has both advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that links to their pages usually are stable, in contrast with web sites from persons or organizations that get lost from sites being reorganized. Another is that some pages describe the history of very specific terms, like a subtype of thrown being Defenestration (throwing someone out of a window).

A disadvantage is that some Wikipedia pages are rather shallow. For example, the page on Stage fright says nothing about how common it is. On August 12, 2015 I blogged about how There’s really no mystery about how common stage fright is.

We all make lots of spelling misteaks

We all make lots of spelling mistakes when writing, but usually catch almost all of them. It is particularly embarrassing to leave typos in slide or presentation titles when using PowerPoint or Keynote.

My most typical typo is to capitalize the first two letters in a new sentence, like THe. Some typos will still be words - but other than what was intended, and will not be caught by the spelling checker in our word processing software.

On May 9, 2019 there was a BBC News article titled When spelling goes wrong: famous typos from Trump to NASA. It recounted how the Reserve Bank of Australia misspelled ‘responsibility’ as ‘responsibilty’ on 46 million of their new yellow fifty-dollar banknotes.

I got curious and Googled responsibilty. There were web articles titled both What Is Social Responsibilty for an Organization? and Shoveling: Who’s Responsibilty? Blogging software like Google Blogger (which I use) and WordPress have the post title entered separately. When you are in a hurry, it is easy to add the title just before you post. I long ago learned to write both the title and text in Microsoft Word or Apple Pages so the title also went through a spelling check.

The image of two steaks came from Jon Sullivan at Wikimedia Commons.

Do you believe everything that you read?

Sometimes the written instructions you receive just are wrong. On April 10, 2019 there was an article at Computerworld in Shark Tank titled Don’t RTFM, and subtitled Do you believe everything you read? RTFM is the overused acronym for Read That Friendly Manual.

It told a story about a radio transmitter used by the army. The storyteller, who maintained electronics, had been in a unit where that equipment first was deployed. He and others were trained by the manufacturer, or by those who they had directly trained. Their units had only minor problems with the transmitter. But other units had many failures of the large, expensive final amplifier tube similar to one shown above.

Eventually he and a senior operator were assigned to visit one of the other units. That senior operator watched what the others were doing, and was horrified. Before shutting off power to the transmitter they were turning the gain control knob for the final amplifier fully clockwise (CW) to maximum power. Instead they should have been turning that knob fully counterclockwise (CCW) to minimum power, as shown above.  

They said we just were following orders. We did exactly what the manual told us to do! They didn’t think about whether that instruction made any sense. He corrected the manual to say counterclockwise, and informed  all other units to do the same.

What had gone wrong? Presumably whoever began writing the manual meant to use the abbreviation CCW but accidentally left off one C – a simple typographic error. Then during editing the words got spelled out but incorrectly.

I remember once seeing a case about a tall retaining wall in a book on construction failures. The drawing had specified 1-1/4” diameter steel reinforcing rods. When the drawing was copied the ‘1’ got so light it was illegible, and much thinner 1/4” rods were used instead!

An image of a vacuum tube came from Wikimedia Commons.

Proofread both the text and title of your speech or article

On December 2, 2018 Jane Genova posted an article titled Another high achiever commits suicide – Vice Admiral Scott Stearney, 58. She claimed:

“As the Daily Mail reports, Stearney was 58 yeas (sic) old. At the time he was overseeing naval operations in the Middle East as well as being a husband and father. He had joined the navy when he was 58.”

But according to the Daily Mail Stearney actually joined the navy back in 1982 – when he was around 22. Jane’s fascination with suicide is macabre.

On November 25, 2018 Jane posted another article with a mangled title - “FBI” – Will This New Dick Wolf Series Be Renew or Cancel? That title should have been something more like Will ‘FBI’, the new TV crime show from Dick Wolf, be renewed or canceled? Jane linked to an article at TV Series Finale that tabulated ratings for the first eight episodes. Then she whined that the relationships within the FBI unit had not gelled, and her vote would be to cancel. But she never looked further to ask why that happened.

According to  the Merriam-Webster dictionary a showrunner is:

“a person who oversees the writing and production of each episode of a television series and has ultimate managerial and creative control over the series.”

An article by Joe Otterson in Variety on October 10, 2018 titled Dick Wolf’s ‘FBI’ changes showrunners for second time described how the series had switched from Craig Turk, to Greg Plageman, and then to the tag team of Rick Eid and Derek Haas.

Jane had changed her mind. Earlier on October 31, 2018 she wrote another article titled Dick Wolf’s ‘FBI’ getting its footing that said her hunch was that ‘FBI’ will have a second season.

UPDATE

On December 9 th Jane posted another incorrectly titled article titled It Goes All the Way Back to Cain and Able (sic).

A humorous typo

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Cartoonist Doug Savage lead up to it by posting a week of related Savage Chickens cartoons. On September 14th he posted the one shown above, claiming The Legend of Blackbeard came from the typographical error of adding an extra D.

Humor columnist Dave Barry was responsible for making International Talk Like a Pirate Day into a holiday event. There even is a 6-1/2 minute training video on YouTube. And the Toyota Yaris is the official car for this day, which I blogged about back in July 2011.

Jousting with typos

If you don’t proofread, (and perhaps left Auto Correct on) hilarious typos can slip through. Today at her Jane Genova Speechwriter-Ghostwriter blog she posted about Government’s Role in Deterring All Alcohol Consumption – Coming Regulatory, Business, Cultural Earthquake. She indirectly referred to an article that actually had appeared in The Lancet medical magazine which was titled Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990 -2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of disease Study 2016. In the first sentence of her first paragraph she claimed:

“The study just published in the influential Lancet Medical Journal is calling upon governments around the world to deter all consumption of a brisk seller in many economies.”

But in the first sentence of her eleventh paragraph the magazine had changed to instead become about one of King Arthur’s knights:

“The research published in the Lancelot Medical Journal is based on reviewing about 1,000 studies.”

She also reposted that article both at her Law and More blog and at her Aging On Your Terms – The Coach blog.

The image of jousting was cropped from here at Wikimedia Commons.