See Also: 11 Smells That Are Slowly Disappearing 4. In 1631, London’s Baker Book House rewrote the 10 Commandments when a missing word in the seventh directive declared, “ Thou shalt commit adultery.” Parliament was not singing hallelujah they declared that all erroneous copies of the Good Book-which came to be known as “The Wicked Bible”-be destroyed and fined the London publisher 3000 pounds. Not even the heavenly father is immune to occasional inattention to detail. The damage: $4590 (and eternal damnation) One eagle-eyed bidder hit a payday of Antiques Roadshow proportions when he came across the rare booze, purchased it for $304, then immediately re-sold it for $503,300. Few collectors knew a bottle of Allsopp’s Arctic Ale was up for bid, because it was listed as a bottle of Allsop’s Arctic Ale. THE CASE OF THE ANTIQUE ALEĪ missing ‘P’ cost one sloppy (and we’d have to surmise ill-informed) eBay seller more than half-a-mill on the 150-year-old beer he was auctioning. Clarke called it “the most expensive hyphen in history.” 2. But a single missing hyphen in the coding used to set trajectory and speed caused the craft to explode just minutes after takeoff. The mission was simple: get up close and personal with close neighbor Venus. But a single dash led to absolute failure for NASA in 1962 in the case of Mariner 1, America’s first interplanetary probe. Hyphens don’t usually score high on the list of most important punctuation. Here are 10 other costly typos that give the phrase “economy of words” new meaning. Google, on the other hand, loves a good typing transposition: Harvard University researchers claim that the company earns about $497 million each year from people mistyping the names of popular websites and landing on “typosquatter” sites … which just happen to be littered with Google ads. (Not to mention plenty of faces as red as the star in the company’s logo.) (It should have read $497.) It didn’t take long for the entire inventory to be zapped, at a loss of $450 a pop to the retail giant. In 2013, bauble-loving Texans got the deal of a lifetime when a misprint in a Macy’s mailer advertised a $1500 necklace for just $47. And not just for those individuals whose jobs depend on knowing the difference between “it’s” and “its” or where a comma is most appropriate.
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