Language majors take heart: When someone asks what you plan to do with a degree in English or any other language, simply sneer back at them and say, "Proofread beauty queens' sashes, you moron."

Yes, sad to say, in an era when your phone spells better than you do, there has never been a greater need for proofreaders. Beyond the demise of grammar (because of old age, perhaps), there are just a lot of bad spellers out there.

Take, for instance, the beauty queen sash mentioned above. Organizers of the Miss Universe contest had a bad moment when when they discovered they had misspelled the name of Miss Phillipines', er, Philipines, um, Philippines' native land. I can think of several editor types who would gladly have accepted an all expenses paid assignment to proofread the contestants' sashes, bios and so on.

Closer to home, readers of the Valley News newspaper published in northern New Hampshire apparently speaks Parseltongue, because the paper recently spelled its nameplate as the Valley Newss.

As we all know, typos often slip by because our mind fills in the missing or scrambled information. Sometimes, our minds create something completely different than what is there, as this hungry fellow journalist discovered.

Although it is tempting to do so, don't blame our modern rush-rush techno-world for the howlers that continue to plague all kinds and sizes of publications: Typos happened in slower-paced times (second paragraph), as well. Just be glad you didn't make that one.

UPDATE:
Someone sent this to me, and sadly, I can see it happening:
Bakery Employee: 'Hello, how can I help you?'
Customer: ' I would like to order a cake for a going away party this week.'
Bakery Employee: 'What do you want on the cake?'
Customer: 'Best Wishes Suzanne' and underneath that 'We will miss you'.