The Typo That Survives Extinction

We’ve all been there. You fire off a quick text, only to stare in horror as autocorrect changes “on my way” to “on my wife.” Or perhaps you’ve created a new, nonsensical word that becomes an inside joke with friends. For us, a quick edit or a follow-up “lol, typo” fixes the problem. But what if your typo wasn’t in a fleeting digital message? What if it were in a manuscript, painstakingly copied by hand, and that manuscript was one of the few sources for a foundational text of Western civilization?

Welcome to the world of paleography and textual criticism, a fascinating corner of linguistics where scholars become detectives. Their mission: to hunt down scribal errors that have been copied and recopied for centuries, sometimes becoming so ingrained in a text that they become the accepted “correct” version. These are the typos that survived extinction.

In the Scriptorium: A Recipe for Error

Before we dissect the mistakes, it’s crucial to appreciate the world of the scribe. Forget your well-lit office with an ergonomic chair. A medieval monk in a scriptorium (the monastery’s writing room) worked under grueling conditions:

• Dim Lighting: Often working by the weak light of a window or, against all fire-safety rules, a candle.
• Unforgiving Materials: Writing on treated animal skin (vellum or parchment) with a quill pen cut from a goose feather and ink they may have mixed themselves. A mistake couldn’t be deleted; it had to be painstakingly scraped off with a knife, thinning the precious page.
• The Source Material: They were often copying from an older manuscript that had its own errors, difficult-to-read handwriting, or damage.
• Sheer Monotony: Copying a text word for word, letter for letter, for hours, days, and weeks on end is a mentally taxing job. Fatigue, boredom, and distraction were constant enemies of accuracy.

Given these challenges, it’s not surprising that errors crept in. What’s truly amazing is how accurate these scribes often were. But when mistakes did happen, they tended to fall into predictable patterns.

A Taxonomy of Typos

Linguistic detectives have cataloged the types of errors scribes were prone to making. When they spot one of these in a manuscript, it’s a big clue that the text might have been altered from its original form.

• Haplography: Accidentally writing a letter or sequence of letters that appears twice only once. For example, writing “philology” as “philogy.”
• Dittography: The opposite of haplography, where a scribe repeats a letter or word. This is the ancient equivalent of writing “I went to the the store.”
• Homoeoteleuton: This mouthful of a word (from the Greek for “similar ending”) describes a “wandering eye” error. A scribe is copying a passage, and their eye jumps from one word to a similar-looking word further down the page, omitting the entire section in between.
• Metathesis: The simple transposition of letters or sounds. Old English is full of examples where both “brid” and “bird” or “ax” and “ask” existed side-by-side. Sometimes, one version wins out because of a common scribal preference.
• Misreading Abbreviations: Scribes used a complex system of shorthand to save time and parchment. A tilde (~) over a letter could indicate a missing ‘n’ or ‘m’. A special symbol might stand for a common suffix like “-orum” or “-us.” Misinterpreting one of these marks could create a completely new word form.

Case File #1: Syllabus, The Accidental Word

Have you ever wondered about the etymology of the word “syllabus”? It feels vaguely Latin or Greek, and for good reason. It’s one of history’s most successful typos.

The Roman statesman and writer Cicero wrote a series of letters to his friend Atticus. In these letters, he mentioned the small parchment labels or tags (sittybas in Greek, or σίττυβας) that were attached to scrolls to identify their contents. Centuries later, in a 15th-century manuscript of Cicero’s letters, a scribe misread the word. The accusative plural form, sittybas, was transcribed as syllabus.

This single error in a single manuscript was influential. The new, phantom word “syllabus” was picked up by scholars and printers, who assumed it was a legitimate Latin noun for a “list” or “table of contents.” It entered the English language in the 17th century and has been a source of dread for students ever since. There was never a classical Latin word “syllabus”—we invented it from a slip of the pen.

Case File #2: The Stubborn Priest and the “Mumpsimus”

Sometimes, an error becomes a testament not to oversight, but to stubbornness. The great Renaissance humanist Erasmus tells the story of an elderly, illiterate priest who for decades had been reciting a part of the Latin Mass incorrectly. Instead of saying “quod in ore sumpsimus, Domine” (“what we have taken in the mouth, O Lord”), he said “quod in ore mumpsimus, Domine.”

When a younger, more educated cleric tried to correct him, the old priest refused to change. “I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus”, he declared. He was comfortable with his error and saw no reason to adopt the correct version.

The story became so famous that “mumpsimus” entered the English language. It now refers to a person who stubbornly clings to an error, custom, or idea despite clear evidence that it is wrong. It’s a fossilized typo that became a word about fossilized thinking.

The Linguistic Detective Work

So how do scholars actually prove a word is a fossilized typo? The process, known as textual criticism, is like forensic science for old books.

Scholars gather all the surviving manuscript copies of a particular text. They compare them line by line, noting every single variation, from a one-letter difference to a whole missing paragraph. By mapping these variations, they can construct a stemma codicum, or a family tree of manuscripts, showing which ones were likely copied from which.

When a strange word or phrase appears in only one branch of this family tree, it’s a red flag. If that word also has no other known root and can be explained by a common scribal error (like misreading sittybas as syllabus), the case gets stronger. The goal is to work backwards through the layers of copies and corrections to reconstruct a text as close to the author’s original—the “urtext”—as possible.

These fossilized typos are more than just historical curiosities. They are a powerful reminder that language is a fundamentally human and messy process. They are monuments to a scribe’s tired eyes, a moment of distraction, or a poorly lit desk centuries ago. They show us that texts are not static artifacts, but living documents, shaped and reshaped by the hands that have passed them down. The next time you see the word “syllabus”, take a moment to appreciate the anonymous, long-dead scribe whose tiny mistake gave us a brand new word.