My Kind of Typos

First things first: Remember the Alamo!

Here up north the snow came on Sunday afternoon to remind one and all that winter, as always, plans to be a lingering guest. Still, the view out my home-office window, looking at a minuscule fraction of suburbia, was gray and white and better-looking than all of February. The trees coated with snow. So did the ground.

A pleasant day for a roaring fire and whatever the best people drink in front of roaring fires. We do not build roaring fires, or even meek ones, in our fireplace, however, out of a (probably) ungrounded fear that Ann would find something interesting to do with a cooling but still fiery ember, like hide it under the couch cushions.

I have a long history of making certain mistakes in writing that I usually (but not always) catch at first-draft stage. Often, for instance, I omit the “r” from “your,” but that’s not very entertaining—just a few million synapses misfiring. But also have a longstanding practice of using a completely different word in place of what I meant. I don’t know if this is a common sort of typo or not, but I remember as long ago as 8th grade writing “ball hall” for “band hall,” for example.

Today I was writing a headline, and on my read-through before filing the story, I noticed: “$60M Mixed-Up Development Slated…” Instead of Mixed-Use, which is the completely logical real estate term for a project that contains more than one of the following: office, industrial, retail, multifamily residential or hotel. These elements tend to be separated by something, such as parking lots, but “mixed-up” would be a little more blurred. An office building, say, with a mixture of cubicals, retail kiosks (those knickknack islands in malls) and a few hotel-pool cabanas. The Random Business Park. Chaos Crossroads. Salmagundi Executive Suites.