This Week's Inquirer: A typo caused a Pa. town to mistakenly hire Tamir Rice’s killer

Tioga, Pa., recently hired the killer of 12-year-old Tamir Rice as a police officer because of a typo in the officer's name. Sometimes, these mistakes aren't accidental.

There’s nothing worse than a typo. One minute you’re totally coherent, and than the next minuet your bunging avery other world like a looser who drooped out of pubic school. And as that last sentence proves, spellcheck won’t save you.

Just ask the borough council of Tioga, Pa., which two weeks ago learned it had violated state statutes by hiring as the town’s sole police officer the man who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014.

The culprit? A typo in the officer’s name.

There’s no evidence that the town (or the officer) intended to deceive anyone when it misspelled the officer’s name. But if it did, it wouldn’t be the first time that a typo was used not just intentionally, but strategically.

The Jan. 6 Committee has reminded Americans about the onslaught of lawsuits that Donald Trump’s legal team and allies filed in the weeks after the 2020 election. But we’ve largely forgotten how typo-ridden those hastily slapped-together lawsuits were. One attorney, Sidney Powell, misspelled the word district three different ways on the very first page of two different lawsuits — districct, distrcoict, and distrct — prompting some on the right to suggest the typos were intentional in order to garner more media attention. Given the decibel level of those postelection days, the suggestion doesn’t seem far-fetched.

A few weeks earlier, the New York Times ran an in-depth examination of so-called typosquatting, a method of inserting intentional typos to circumvent traditional social media efforts to filter out disinformation. The hashtag #BidenCrimeFamily was used for more than a year by conservatives hoping to impugn the future president, but once Twitter’s algorithms started weighing down false stories that featured that hashtag, Trump found a back door: A few days before the election he tweeted #BidenCrimeFamiily — with a doubled ii to evade the algorithm. The typo-laden #BidenCrimeFamiily went viral itself, allowing disinformation to spread faster than Twitter could tamp it down in the crucial last days before the election.

It’s a remarkably low-tech way to stump some of the savviest computer programmers on the planet, and a strategy like this doesn’t have to be cooked up in a shadowy corporate boardroom, or even in the White House communications office. In fact, the fluorescent-lit, rec-basement-looking crowded room where the Tioga borough council unanimously approved Timothy Loehmann’s hiring looks like exactly the kind of place where such a strategy could be borne.

Or should that be born?

Eh, it’s just one letter. What’s the worst that could happen?

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and pseudo-words to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.