I once supervised a software developer who told me that he was not an English major — and therefore had no liability to correct misspellings — when I pointed out a misspelling in an application that he was developing.

His comment astounded me because spelling is a BASIC skill to me.

He almost responded as if I were asking him to write a book about the history of the English language.

No matter what your walk of life, the ability to spell correctly does matter, and I plan to write some blog posts about the importance of spelling words correctly, as well as what can happen because of misspellings.

Here is my first example.

The city of Livermore, California, paid Miami (Florida) artist Maria Alquilar forty thousand dollars to create a sixteen-foot circular mosaic.

Alquilar designed the mosaic for the Livermore public library.

Unfortunately, the mosaic made the city famous in a bad way because the artist originally embedded eleven misspellings in the mosaic’s tiles, including these misspellings of famous people:

• “Eistein”, spelled E-I-S-T-E-I-N, instead of “Einstein”, spelled E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N, for Albert Einstein;
• “Gaugan”, spelled G-A-U-G-A-N, instead of “Gauguin”, spelled G-A-U-G-U-I-N, for Paul Gauguin;
• “Shakespere”, spelled S-H-A-K-E-S-P-E-R-E, instead of “Shakespeare”, spelled S-H-A-K-E-S-P-E-A-R-E, for William Shakespeare.

Apparently, the artist’s original response was that she was not responsible for correcting the misspellings because she was using artistic license.

Livermore eventually spent another six thousand dollars, plus airfare, some three years ago this month — in August, 2005 — to have the artist travel back to Livermore and correct her misspellings.

If the airfare was $600, then Livermore paid SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS PER MISSPELLING for the corrections.

What is the most expensive misspelling about which you have ever read? If you have one that you want me to share with other readers, please contact me. Be sure to include a link to the Web page where the misspelling is described.