Freudian Typo #469

Blogger New Alb Annie Googled herself the other day and was surprised to find her name in the minutes of the "Board of Pubic Works and Safety" of New Albany, Indiana. It got me thinking that this must be a fairly common typo, and one that most spell-checking software will politely ignore.

Apparently it does happen.

A quick set of searches found 149 mentions of a "Board of Pubic." There were only 44 mentions of "Pubic Accountancy," though we could probably use more of that.

I found 9,260 mentions of "Pubic Education" and 256 of "Pubic Ed," for those who like to get right down to it. I suppose that this is one area where it really does make life easier to proof-read very carefully and thus avoid protracted media investigations.

There were 695 mentions of "Pubic Utilities" but there were 16,900 mentions of "Pubic Works." While I'm tempted to be clever here about those two areas of endeavor, I'll leave it alone.

While Google in each case demurely suggested searching for the "Public" version instead of the "Pubic," it did dutifully perform the searches as I had typed them. The sponsored link ads, however, stayed stolidly in the public realm, ignoring the pubic entirely.