Yearbook Spelling Mistake Oldie But Goodie

Yeah, it's twelve years old, but here's one for your "HTF did that happen?" file. The cover of La Salle University's 1996 yearbook features a misspelling of the school's name. Wait, what? Repeat: the name of the school is spelled wrong...on the cover of the yearbook.

Unbelievably, the school's name is spelled with one too many Ls: "La Sallle," triple L. And that's La Salle University in Philadelphia, the accredited, legitimate and respected university; not this impostor in the Philippines and not "LaSalle University," the diploma mill that has been shut down and whose founder was indicted on many counts of fraud and sentenced to a prison term.

The error appears in several places throughout the yearbook, in addition to the cover, as you can see from another picture of the mistake below. This is one of the more bewildering (and funny) printed mistakes the Proofreader will probably ever encounter, a true team effort that resulted in a leviathan blunder. How many people looked at the copy and didn't notice the trifecta of Ls in the university's name to be printed on the book's cover? The yearbook staff, school administrators, the company that printed the yearbook, etc. all had a hand in the blunder.

The Proofreader is ceaselessly amazed at how mistakes like this and those on the signs in Hoboken are allowed to be printed on things that are created for the explicit purpose of being looked at repeatedly over a long period of time.

How does a keepsake that will presumably be gazed upon for a generation or two get tattooed with such an egregious miscue? The possibilities are endless and there's really no telling how this one happened. But one thing's for sure: This is a mistake that absolutely never should have been made.

This post was originally published on December 11, 2008.