So these signs went up all over downtown Ottawa, and now they are being taken down rapidly. The issue is the second word in the title, which is missing the letter “L”.
This highlights the difference between spell checking and proofreading.
Jun 29, 2026, 10:02 PM@jvschrag And they made BS excuses as usual. 🙄
But I like to say Welcome to the national capital of Canada, country with 2 official languages! (Sarcasm)
@wendynather @slothrop Well, it certainly is when I do it! <rim shot>
@jvschrag In French, it's what we called "une couille" (or a coquille, but couille is funnier)
@Bloobz Merci pour ce nouveau mot !
@jvschrag AI <> QA
@jvschrag People who handle Romance languages: [Sniggering]
@jvschrag on dirait un terme médical mignon
@jvschrag as a non-french speaker I was like "where does the L go?" And after about 20 seconds I was like "oooohhhhh" 😂
@jvschrag there was a "pubic school" moment in Idiocracy movie...
@jvschrag Years ago while applying for a building permit to do some construction, my parents had to go before the city planning board to request an exception from a code requirement (the house was built six feet from the property line in the 1930s and the new setback requirement was ten feet, they wanted to build a second floor on the existing footprint - an entirely reasonable request that was ultimately approved).
As part of the process, they had to pay a "pubic hearing fee".
@jvschrag @inthehands My oft-repeated advice to everyone on earth is to go into the spell-check options in $preferred_text_editor and set “pubic” to autocorrect to “public” (or their equivalents in the local tongue). About the only exception would be for people in highly specific lines of work.
@jvschrag i've seen this bit done in one of those mock-silent movies in the seventies full of the best of english comedy actors — Futtock's End, was it? — but never in real life!
