I saw “ORIGINAL COPY” misspelled in a YouTube video yesterday while writing my blog post about Engrish.com.

The phrase went right past me when I first saw it yesterday — probably because it is so common, especially in American English.

But reading the phrase a second time made me think, “Huh?!”

How can something be original and a copy at the same time?

It cannot, so this phrase is a self-negation.

For fun, I searched Google for “original copy” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 1,100,000 matches.

Yikes!