Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Calling the kettie black


This is an information card taken from my room at the Dan Panorama Hotel in Eilat, Israel. Notice the English translation requests:

You are kindly requested not to use electrical appliances such as irons, ketties, etc. in your room.


So what is a ketty, or ketties? Well, in the Hebrew version above, it corresponds with the word קומקום

which translates to KETTLES. So I'm guessing when someone was translating the Hebrew into English, they used a lowercase L when writing KETTlES, and this was reasonably mistaken for an uppercase i by the non-English speaking printer. By the way, this is not the first time someone has made the grave error of substituting a handwritten lowercase L for a printed uppercase i.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

I'll DEBATE


Christian C. found this report for the 2008 presidential debate on the front page of the Huffington Post today. It's not confusing to read, but certainly an interesting editorial choice to only make the L's lowercase in "I'll", while all the other letters in the headline, including the typically lowercase first "c" in McCain, are uppercase. They may have been trying to save some space, considering there is no space between the ellipsis and BRING UP.