Proofreading Blunders Will Cost You Dearly

I don’t know whether you saw it, but last week I posted on Briar Copywriting’s blog about the £8.8m proofreading blunder.

Well, according to a recent article in the i newspaper, it would appear that failing to proofread things isn’t  modern day phenomena and it has led to some startling results.

Just in case the image above is hard to read, here are the 6 proofreading errors:

Peak Humiliation

The UK’s biggest tourism drive, which cost £125m, sought to entice visitors to our shores in 2012. Unfortunately, a global poster campaign had to be pulled as it referred to the Brecon Beacons as the ‘Breacon Beacons’.

Rough Trade

A trader on the Tokyo stick exchange wanted to trade one share at 610,000 yen in 2005. Instead, he accidentally sold 610,000 shares at one yen each. His firmlost an embarrassing 27bn yen (£150m).

Stroke of Luck

A US car dealership produced 50,000 scratch-cards offering $1,000 in 2007. A misprint resulted in every ticket being a winner. The firm appeased customers by offering them gift cards, setting it back $250,000.

NASA’s Dashed Hopes

A single missing hyphen in the coding used to set trajectory and speed of Mariner 1, NASA’s first interplanetary probe, caused the craft to deviate from the correct course moments after take-off in 1962. The £53m craft was destroyed.

One For The Books

In 1631 printer Robert Barker produced 1,000 Bibles for Charles I, but an omitted ‘not’ meant the Seventh Commandment read “Thou shalt commit adultery”. The book was dubbed the Wicked Bible and Barker went out of business.

And Finally…

The search engine giant Google was actually supposed to be named ‘Googol’, but when registering the domain name in 1997, a slip of the finger resulted in the website we know today.

Thanks i!