simple mistake's

1.  From the BBC:

Retailer Marks & Spencer has admitted making a "silly mistake" after getting a slogan on its children's Christmas pyjamas range grammatically wrong.

The slogan "Mum's dreaming of a quiet Christmas just like the one's she used to know" has a rogue second apostrophe.

Oh dear. 

At the ripe old age of 37, I have recently learned when to use "it's" and when to use "its".  While I am very proud of myself, I'm also slightly bothered because I now notice when other people get it wrong - and I'm simply not the sort of person who notices these things. 

2.  But, I understand why these sorts of things are important.

I went to university in a smallish New Zealand town called Hamilton.  Nothing much happened in Hamilton, but one of the joys I recall most fondly - as I was an immature, but brilliant computer science student back then - was riding my motorbike past one of the small video shops on the outskirts of town.  It was called FLICKERS and if I rode past the shop at night fast enough then the neon letters "L" and "I" blurred together, charmingly renaming the shop.

 

Isn't it fascinating how one tiny, tiny, tiny blur can cause such an unexpected and significant change in meaning?

3.  But the worse case I've ever seen was when the tutors at my University put together a training book for a first year programming course which used a modular two version of Logo.  The newbies would write programs to send a little insect around the screen leaving a trail behind it.  The tutorial had a library of functions such as up, down, left, right, penUp, penDown, but my favourite was the function which returned the X and Y co-ordinates of the insect.  It was innocently called penIs.  They only noticed after the books had been printed.  Ooops.