It’s happened to all of us: It’s Monday morning. You’ve had a big weekend. The boss is right in your ear telling you to get out a press release about a man who allegedly entered a chemist in Brisbane the night prior, claiming to have a bomb. You make a typo. So what? Surely no one will notice and if they do, who will care? Only journos look at these things and they care about what happened, not about your spelling. But oh no. Oh no oh no. It was a noticeable typo. Because you accidentally did this:
The man has been charged with one…🤭⚠️ pic.twitter.com/RM1Yf9PnzS
— Josh Bavas (@JoshBavas) February 24, 2019
There’s two ways a reader can interpret this. They can mentally put the ‘o’ back where it belongs, rendering it a perfectly ordinary sentence. Or, you can do as I did on reading this this morning, and insert an imaginary ‘a’ after the ‘of’, making this a much more emphatic press release about one cunt of a bomb hoax.
As much as I would like to believe that the latter was the intended reception, it was apparently not, with the release later being updated minus the typo:
The man, charged with claiming to have a bomb at a chemist in Annerley last night, will front Brisbane Magistrates Court today.
