SpellCheck!

"Buy God at Mumbai rates" screamed the billboard near the traffic signal. I nearly jumped out of my Best bus seat in shock. What, have they come down to this, I asked myself, still unbelieving. Only when I finished the whole of the advertisement did my shock disappear, only to leave a fit of giggles in its wake. Ignoring the funny looks that my co-passengers were giving me, I proceeded to read the whole ad once more. It turned out to be a commercial for a jewellery center and the term God did not refer to any supreme being but was a mistyped version of the word "Gold".

This was not the first occasion that I had come across a simple misspelled word leading to hilarious results. Just a few days ago I did a double take when I saw a shop announcing 'teen works' as part of its services. It turned out that it was a repair shop for all kinds of metal works and the announcement referred to 'tin works'. Had innumerable scrap metal parts not been lying in and around the shop, perhaps one may have mistaken the shop's services and taken the shop to court.

Then there was this wedding card that was cheerfully signed "cardially yours". Perhaps the person was a cardiac surgeon by profession and it showed up innocently with the 'o' being replaced with an 'a.'

It's understandable if less educated people make such mistakes but quite so often it's the so-called well-educated people who misspell a word or two. While I am no perfectionist myself, it does amuse me to see my colleagues write "Personnel" as the reason for their leave. There was this man who when asked to fill in the department of the organization he worked for, wrote "Personal."

The Internet has opened new doors and windows for us in terms of communication. But it has also spawned a new category of mistakes made inadvertently by people using chat or such facilities. Very often, our messenger software halts abruptly thus severing any real time conversation that was taking place. During one such session I was having with a former colleague, who is now settled abroad, he asked me, "Can you please bare with me?" For a moment, I was stunned speechless. Only after a few seconds did the right meaning get to me and I laughed out loud to the consternation of my co-workers.

One of the most common howlers I have come across in terms of misspelled words is the term hippocrate. It makes you wonder if the person was referring to someone having gigantic proportions of hypocrisy.