BY: DANAT TESFAYE
There are famous sayings in Ethiopia that stress making mistake is normal and natural; ke sew sihtet ke biret ziget aytefam that implies, like iron rust is natural, human beings cannot avoid making mistakes, ke sihtetu yemaymar fenj amkagn bcha new, entails, everyone has the chance to learn from his/ her own mistakes except for a bomb squad technician. These proverbs are meant to encourage people learn from their mistakes accepting the fact that no one is perfect and free from errors. But if someone is not ready to learn from mistakes and keeps forgiving for him/herself recalling those proverbs, there is no way that the person differs from the bomb squad technicians.
Carelessness is sometimes the source of making mistakes. Such behavior could affect the life of that person in loosing trust among people. This piece focuses on spelling and punctuation errors/mistakes and their effect in ruining big companies and leading them to catastrophe. One may think that spelling errors has no significant effect on the continuation of companies, but big companies like NASA and Taylor and Sons Ltd are good examples for their loss of millions of dollars and trust among people.
The company Taylor and Sons Ltd lost $40 million and dissolved just because the letter “S” is omitted. Though the company was able to correct the mistake after three days but couldn’t help, as orders were cancelled, employees were asking for their salaries and leaving the company and suppliers withdraw credits. All these messes happened just because the omission of one letter; with the omission of “S” there is another company called Tylor and Son that had already gone into liquidation.
Another big damage happened to NASA is with a silly mistake; omission of a hyphen. In 1962 US launched a programme to explore the planet- Venus, though the rocket was launched, it couldn’t last flying more than five minutes, it blown into pieces. Wrong information was fed to the spacecraft control system just because a hyphen is left out. The consequence was loss of worth $ 80 million.
These companies have taken lessons from their silly but much affecting mistakes, and other companies and different firms have also learned a lot.
English language is one of the languages that are vulnerable to misspelling. The nature of the language could be a reason for the misspelling; there is no one to one correspondence between the arbitrary letters (alphabet) and the sound. For instance: the vowel A can be read as (a in bad, e in Airplane, o in All, and u in About). The most commonly misspelled words of English language include: Accommodate, Separate, Definitely and Maintenance.
Even these days with more advanced computer technologies to minimize spelling errors, many spelling mistakes found in advertisements. Walking around Piassa in the capital Addis Ababa, one can notice many spelling errors on billboards mainly in the jewelry and laundry shops. Of 23 jewelry shops 18 of them misspelled jewelry as ‘jewellery’. Laundry is also misspelled like ‘laundary’, ‘lawndery’ etc. companies should not wait until they lose their name and millions of birr to learn from their spelling mistakes.
The owners of the above mentioned jewelry and laundry shops may argue that English is not their first language (Mother Tongue) and they should not be blamed for the spelling errors, but, in this digital writing environment, it’s not difficult to use spellchecker. Leave aside the issue of mother tongue, even in mother tongue language, people tend to make spelling mistakes.
As a consumer, a person does not want to spend his money to purchase something from a business center that does not care about spelling errors. It is important for businesses to develop the habit of avoiding spelling errors, in order to be trusted and assigned by consumers for huge responsibilities. Spelling error is one of the common mistakes; it looks a silly mistake but has a considerable impact not only on business sectors but also on media, educational and government institutions. Educational institutions are expected to be free from errors as they are responsible for shaping the generation in knowledge and wisdom. Hence, if such institutions are not free from spelling errors (“the silly mistake”), they could not build a trust among people to take the responsibility in shaping generation with knowledge.
While media and government institutions, need to give due attention to spelling errors and be highly accountable for their language use, as they reach many people and may lead to wrong perception.
So as to minimize spelling errors, different kinds of tips can be applied. The leading technique is to proofread what is written; fully relying on digital spellcheckers may lead to missing some mistakes. Therefore to double check manually is important. Peer reviews, read aloud and read bottom up are also of the relevant techniques to minimize spelling errors.
The Ethiopian Herald June 24/2022
