I saw this on a hand-written “bandit” sign this morning.

Problem:
The misspelling is quite obvious, I hope!

Explanation:
A “bandit” sign is what the City of Houston calls any sign placed illegally in a public right-of-way, such as at a street corner.

The misspelling of the word “commercial” — as C-O-M-M-E-R-I-C-A-L — on a sign that read “Power Washing Commerical and Res.” was very obvious.

The sign was one of many hand-written signs that I had seen around Houston in the past week for the same power-washing company, which apparently offers its services to both residential and commercial customers.

What gave me pause, though, was that this was not a typographic error.

Granted, people can easily misspell words when hand-writing them, too.

But this particular error (Would you call it a “hand-o” instead of a “typo”?) caught my eye because it immediately looked wrong.

This makes me wonder whether the sign writer was simply guessing at the proper order of the letters, knowing that there were both an “i” and a “c” in the middle of the adjective “Commercial”.

Such will be the fate of anyone who is not taught phonetics, in my opinion.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “commercial” — 672,000,000 matches
• “commerical” — 5,450,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 123-to-1, which is excellent, although my enthusiasm is dampened by the nearly 5.5 million misspellings.

Solution:
“Power Washing: Commercial and Res.”