Memoorials or better Memorials

Memorials and Cremation Urns

In the memoorial, uh, memorial industry, accidental misspellings are common, and they can actually be humorous. (And in a business that deals with serious, frightening topic of death, light hearted humor is usually very welcome.) One of the most common misspellings, of course, is the infamous memoorials in place of memorials. That extra "o" in memoorials has plagued many a writer using fancy software designed for fast hands that do not necessarily need to press a computer key all the way down to register a letter on the screen. Press the key a little too hard or too long, and, well, two o's show up. That is when memorials turns, innocently, into memoorials. Let the cow jokes begin!

Today's word processing software does its best to help prevent misspellings. For this article, for example, the word processor automatically corrected the four instances of memoorial we entered above. We had to make a special effort to misspell the words.

But, even with such wonderful technology, memorials still has a way of often ending up as memoorials.

Here is a quick list of other words that are commonly misspelled in the memoorial industry.

Cremation often turns up as cremeation or, better yet, creamtion.

Statues sometimes become status or, in at least one case, statews.

Cemeteries have been known to be cemeterys or cemeteres.

Jewelry is often jewlery, bronze and granite sometimes get their e’s chopped off, and caskets often get an extra t.

And Cloisonné urns. Well they often end up as the urn with the weird spelling; as example cloisonne.

And those kinds of typos can bring about a smile in even the darkest of hours on the darkest of days.

Nobody likes a spelling mistake, of course, and most people take great pains to assure that their public writing is free of them. Nevertheless, even the most careful of proof readers cannot claim perfection in all times. (Just as every pitcher in the Baseball Hall of Fame is sure to have surrendered more than one home run in his career.) So the best that one can usually do in the face of a typographical miscue is to just laugh. And, when memorial turns in memoorial, giving a chuckle is not hard.

Misspellings have a variety of causes, from lazy fingers to lazy minds. But they have one bad thing in common: they can potentially result in miscommunication. (Does the man want the status of his wife or the statue of his wife? There is a big difference, is there not?)

So, while everyone creates alphabetical miscues from time to time and the best thing to do about them is to just laugh and move on with life, it is equally important to keep them to a minimum. Or is that minumim?