beware the 'pubic' health notice!

This week, as I was editing a document, one word jumped out at me like a neon sign: PUBIC. You guessed it, it was meant to say ‘public’, but alas, it did not.

And it didn’t just happen the one time. It was almost like the keyboard had simply refused to include the letter ‘l’ whenever this word was typed, and the document was littered with ‘pubic’ options.

Misspellings aren’t a new phenomenon. They’ve happened to the best of us and have crept in even when more than one set of eyes has pored over a document or manuscript. But what is interesting is that misspellings are just so pervasive today, from professional documents, to books, EDMs, social media posts, text messages and everything in between.

What is astounding about this is that we’ve never had so many spelling aids at our fingertips to help us catch those pesky words. From the moment you start typing, you can check your spelling as you work in Word or Google Docs (which highlight a good chunk of misspellings with a red underline), Grammarly (which as well as catching misspellings, tells you how to write a better sentence), to good old spellcheck that you can run when you are done writing, free online dictionaries to check against, and even just Google. Yep, you can google (don’t panic, it’s a verb here, so the lowercase is correct) any partial word or misspelled word and you’ll get an instant summary of its spelling and meaning, as well as how it can be used correctly.

My husband recently showed our children what his father used in the early 1990s to help him with his spelling. Remember those days? There was no smartphone, no wi-fi, no Google and certainly no online dictionary (and even if there was one, you could only access it on a computer that was attached to a dial-up internet line). So, my father-in-law bought himself a Micronta LCD Spellchecker, which he would carry around in his pocket, and when he needed to spell something, he would have a go at the first few letters of a word and the spellchecker would complete the spelling for him. It was small, looked like a calculator and was battery operated, so it actually was super handy.

Of course, our kids laughed at the very idea of having such a simple device as a calculator-like spellchecker in your pocket. They just can’t imagine needing such a device when you have everything available on your phone. But it got me thinking, I wonder if we need to simplify the matter for everyone who writes for others, no matter what the context.

When I was a newbie editor, I was shown a case of ‘pubic’ in a published book and told, ‘Always check for “pubic” in a manuscript, even if you have no reason to believe it should be there. And don’t forget to change it to “public”!’

So perhaps, as a rule, we all should check for ‘pubic’ in our documents and make sure they say ‘public’ if that’s what they should mean. In other words, let’s stop relying on the automatic spellchecker to catch the typo for us, and double-check our work via a ‘to-do’ check list when we’re done reading over it/editing it. And while we’re at it, check for ‘heath’ if it’s meant to be ‘health’. And ‘causal’ if it’s meant to be ‘casual’ …