I'm pretty new here, but have been inspired by the posts I've been seeing (not to mention the talent). Hope it's okay to ask one of my own. What would you say is your best/worst typo within the context of a story? When you went back and reread it and realized it gave a whole different meaning than what you were after. Mine wound up being pretty explicit, though it was supposed to be just generally violent, It was suppose to read - 'Her shot had been as blindingly fast, as it had been ruthless.' But as you'll no doubt know, certain letters the are side by side on a regular keyboard. And for that reason the only 'o' in that sentence above was unfortunately replaced with an 'i'. Of course it didn't help matters that the next line was - "Clean yourselves," she ordered the rest of the team. Almost like kismet. It's really the only time I ever felt bad for that character.
I have a character whose name is one letter off the word 'shame' and early on I accidentally called them that a lot My favorite part is that - especially earlier, when I kept making the mistake - they're quite haughty and shameless.
I don't have one that creates any sort of unintended meaning, but I do have a very common typo that drives me batty. I regularly type you instead of your when it should be the possessive. It serves as a bête noire because it perfectly imitates a common syntax error made by Latinos (I'm Latino) when learning to speak English. The only difference between you and your in Spanish is whether or not you put an accent mark over the u. Tú = you. Tu = your. The two words in Spanish are pronounced identically. This leads many Spanish speakers to replicate this structure in English, using you for both the subject and the possessive. It bugs the jinkies out of me as a typo because I work as a legal translator and when that typo creeps into my work it makes it look as though my English is questionable, and certainly not at the level needed to work in juridical realms.
That's really funny, actually. Not so much the typo itself, but the next line added to it! Did you discover the mistake yourself or did a beta reader catch it? I often type 'god' when I meant to type 'dog.' Animal lovers usually approve.
I do that all the time. I have a canine character in my WIP, and the human characters don't know his name so they just call him Dog. As an atheist and a dog-lover, making this error several times a day is becoming extremely irritating.
