Well, not exactly

Once upon a time, when typewriters ruled the earth, there were certain kinds of "typographical errors" that were rather common. Reversing the order of certain letters ("ot" instead of "to"), spacing errors and the like.

Now that word processing chews up and spits out every word written, those sorts of errors have gone away, but new ones have been introduced. Spell checking makes your humble and obedient servant look like he's not brain-damaged, since I cannot spell any word of more than two letters. But, as a Government attorney, I have frequent occasion to refer to the "United States." And the spell-checker doesn't help if I accidently switch the "i" and the "t", since the consequence is a real word. (And, come to think of it, might sometimes more accurately describe the Government. But I digress.)

In legal writing we will sometimes use the Latin phrase "sua sponte." As we lawyers use it, it means that someone (usually a court) has done something on its own motion, without being asked by a party to litigation, for example. As in, "The Court, sua sponte, excluded the evidence offered by plaintiff."

If you spell-check a document with the phrase "sua sponte" in it, WordPerfect wants to change it to "sea sponge," and that's Word's second choice, as well. (Word want's it to be "Sue sponge.")

Since anything that can go wrong will go wrong, this actually happened to an attorney in Santa Cruz. A brief he filed made the change at least five times, producing sentences like this:

It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense.

Story HERE.