/ Rob Beschizza / 5:23 am Thu Jun 7, 2012

Congratulations on completing the progam

A batch of high school diplomas from Upper Marlboro, Maryland, must be reprinted, because they all contained a misspelling of the word "program". [Jenni Pompi and John Davisson / Patch]

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      2. i think it’d be nice if we could have “programme” to refer to e.g. scheduling and social programmes, so that “program” could refer just to computer code. although this confusion rarely comes up*, it just bugs me.

        *: possibly the only possible case: i have written a c program to compute a dynamic programme.

          1. yippee! that’s good to hear. however, here in america, when i use the word “programme,” people think i’m some weird anglophile. semi-related: i was once mocked by my CEO for using DD MM YYYY notation. shit like this is why we aren’t on metric.

          2. @retchdog

            I never did understand why Americans put the month before the day, but keep the year at the end. Days to years or years to days. Anything else is akin to putting seconds between minutes and hours. It’s just odd.

    1. Very much so. And, to my eye at least, it’s considerably more noticeable than the spelling error.

      1. Professional print shop, or farmed out to superintendent’s brother-in-law with a home computer using QuarkXpress?

  5. Outsourcing.

    Any decent print shop can print diplomas, but they chose to not support local business.

    In fact, you can print diplomas on a decent home printer. Perhaps schools should look at doing such as a teaching exercise.

    2. A print shop isn’t responsible for the spelling and content of what they’re printing, no matter whether they’re local or not. Copy editing is a separate job. Also it would get annoying to argue with customers who can’t spell but think they can.

      1. I used to work at a print shop.  Sometimes we’d get a typesetting job in a language I didn’t know, like Tagalog.  I always told them “What you see is what you get; I will print exactly what you give me.”  I had no idea if what I set for them had grammar or spelling errors.  All I could do is try not to introduce any new mistakes.

  6. Pardon the mess! I was hurriedly rewriting the post because I realized the AP story I’d originally linked to was an uncredited swipe of an earlier Patch item.

    Check it out: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2012-06-07-School%20Diplomas-Misspelling/id-12ec018b7ab8488bb21e72d2a01aa633

    The funniest part is the AP forgot to include the spelling error in its story about the spelling error, an omission that would not have happened if the writer was thinking about the story rather than how best to rewrite someone else’s.

    Accordingly, I’ve removed my speculation on what the error was; I am, of course, disappointed at the lack of inadvertent pogrom.

  8. Kent State (my alma mater) misspelled the word “privileges” on diplomas for December 2003 graduations. My wife had to get her diploma reprinted because of this.

  9. Perhaps it’s an ironic comment on the state of the US educational system (or lack of)? Quite witty …

  10. Could be worse, imagine if you misspelled the name of the country you were running for president of.  

  12. I once got a certificate which surely was typed by the blind 1-day-intern. Everyone would have seen the errors, including “117 of June”

  13. Well, I, for one, am progam.  Rita Gam’s, er, gams, fer instance.

    On a gam, if the seas were calm, we could watch a gam of whales, too.

  15. It could be much worse.  It could have been “progrom”.

    Old-time printers knew well that the fancier fonts were more prone to typos because they were harder to read — Engraver’s Old English was notorious in that regard — and took extra care.

  16. Um, I hope I’m not the only one that noticed that EVERY letter P on that diploma is printed like that…pretty sure it’s just an odd scripty-like typeface. Also, as an aside, @Brian Easton , “American” English is not a language, at best it’s a dialect, and at worst it’s an uncreative bastardization of English which basically leaves the letter “U” out of stuff like rumour and neighbour in a lame attempt to be different. American is neither a language, nor a cheese. Get over it.

    3.  Now, now, Adam, let’s not be defensive.  The Americans have given us many valuable additions to our language.  Moron, for example.

    4. I’d be careful with that bastardization there, mate. Some might detect creeping Americanization. Best to stick to bastardisation – just to be on the safe side.

      1. The sad thing is that was probably the result of autocorrect, American English tends to be the default, which is genuinely maddening to non-Americans. It might have been enough to tip him over the edge.

        Back when I used Microsoft office I remember a period when word would revert to US English every time it started up. Enough to drive anyone mad.

        * when I say autocorrect I mean any system, not just the iOS one.

    5. On the spelling thing, the regional spellings of English separated before spelling was codified – an excellent example is the U or lack thereof in Color/Rumor/etc. That specific one is because of Samuel Johnson’s preferences vs. Noah Webster’s, Johnson wrote the dictionary that most British people tended to use in the 19th century while Webster wrote the one that most Americans tended to use. Also, in a lot of instances “American” English is closer to the original structure of the language than “British” English because, well, all languages evolve. It’s not like “American” made all these wacky changes and “British” is still being spoken the same way that it was in 1775.

      That all being said, you are correct with your main point, they’re both just dialects (even if the American one is obviously better and the people who use it are superior in actually getting a joke).

    6. First they came for the letter U, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t English.
      Then they came for the letter R…

    7. If you weren’t so eager to jump in with some pointless diatribe about American English, you might have taken the time to work out what the actual issue was that everyone else was talking about.

      Oops, sorry, I forgot I’m American. “…that everyone else was talking abot.”

    8. Old linguistics joke:
      What’s the difference between a language and a dialect?  The language is the one with an army.

  17. At least they’re retyping them.  Everybody makes mistakes.

    Shortly before I pulled my son out of the US public school system, I pointed out to the local elementary school principal several egregious spelling errors in the official school notices posted in the cafeteria.

    Those signs were never corrected during the two years I paid attention to them.

  18. The misspelling proves that it is, indeed, a valid certificate from the U.S. Public School System, and not a counterfeit.

  20. A couple of years ago my best friend’s son won the city-wide spelling bee in Portland for the 4th grade level. In front of a large audience, he was given a “certficate” of award. My friend and her son noticed right away and asked the organizers to do something about it, to which they were brushed off because it wasn’t considered important. Now the “certficate” is mounted on their wall. The best part? The spelling be winner and his mother are English. Welcome to ‘Merica, ya’ll!

    1. This is what happens when you don’t budget for footmen and pages and equerries.

  21. This seems about right, according to some variation of Murphy’s Law.  Prince George’s County (of which Upper Marlboro is the county seat) has the highest property tax in the state (source) and, to show for it, the lowest-performing schools (source).

    (Having said that, I like our son’s elementary school.)

  22. Apart from the spelling mistake, does any one else think the language (American or English) used  is more than a bit begrudging and backhanded? “has completed in a satisfactory manner” “in accordance with guidelines” doesn’t give me any sense of achievement. Little better than “succeeded in not getting expelled”.

    Oh and some punctuation would be nice!

  25. When  I was a typesetter, it was clear that anything in a script font, or anything particularly large, would never get proofread. People just assumed it was right. And the typo isn’t nearly as offensive as the arrangement of the words “Maryland High School Diploma.” I could have curved those better drunk with an Xacto knife.

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