1. As of March 2007, Arkansas is clamping down on misspellings of the state's possessive form. They now insist on Arkansas's First Lady, Arkansas's interests, and Arkansas's pride in its scenic beauty. These correct spellings are consistent with the general rule that all singular nouns, when they become possessive, add apostrophe and "s."
2. In the Embarrassing Mistakes File, here is another entry. Website makers tout their database by writing:
"This page attempts to collect the largest sources of quotations and related items (proverbs, sayings, maxims, amorphisms, slogans, clichés, etc.)."
But there is no such thing as an amorphism, as their spell checker would have told them. They meant aphorism.
3. Another embarrassing error appears because writers failed to think about what a word meant: "If you look at your day and see all the tolerations you put up with, no wonder you leave stressed."
Those writers might have benefited from a good thesaurus and dictionary. They probably meant "and see all the annoyances you tolerate…."
4. Finally, there is the person who wrote, "After the accident, my car was a total right off." This person meant "a total write-off."
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