Reqir* (for Requir*)

The trickiest requirement when it came to today's typo was coming up with a picture and theme to go with it. I'm not even sure quite how to "pronounce" it: wrecker, maybe? It reminds me of the way my brother (an excellent motorist, I might add) used to think that "reckless" meant you were a good driver, i.e., one without any wrecks. (Reckless is an example of what's known as negatives without positives, words like disgruntled, feckless, ineffable, and nonplussed. Although reck, as it turns out, is actually an Old English/Germanic word meaning to "take care.") In the case of today's typo, what is at stake is not a missing W, but rather a missing single U. Since Q is almost always connected to U in the English language, it would seem unlikely for a typo to separate or lose one of them, but it does happen. And such mistakes may even occur a bit more often when the U is directly followed by an I, since those two letters are right next to each other on the keyboard. My brother, who also appreciated pretty girls and country music, would certainly have loved the group in this photo I finally settled on, an American band called the Wreckers, sassily short for "Cass County Homewreckers." At any rate, there were ten hits on this typo in OhioLINK (including "Reqirunge der Kinder," which is a typo of another kind: Regierunge means "government" in German), plus 419 in WorldCat.

(The Wreckers, June 2007, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid