A Holiday Like No Other

In Kenya, an English-language notice declaring a public holiday for Eid-al-Fitr, the end of the month of Ramadan, raised some eyebrows with a VERY common typo.

Image courtesy of Kevin Walsh from Oxford, England - kenyaUploaded by Smooth_O, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8952514

Gazette Notice 4850 declared June 5, 2019, a pubic holiday rather than a public one.

The error was fixed quickly, but only after being noticed and savaged by eagle-eyed social media users. Some users thought the error was funny, but some were not as forgiving.

Honestly, though, this error is so common (and so potentially damaging) that I always start my document reviews by just doing an automatic search for the word.