Forbear Obnubilation

Thanks to Dick Ford selecting an obscure word from the Oxford English Dictionary for Punday on Facebook, I decided to create a new Zazzle T-shirt.

It's sort of a variant on "Eschew Obfuscation" with both essentially meaning "Keep it simple" or "Never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice."

It wasn't hard to create. I searched for an appropriate image that's in the public domain. It's a portrait of Matthew Arnold, a Victoria-era British poet and social critic.

Simple, right? Yeah, except for one thing: It seems the older I get, the more prone I am to making typos. You can probably see this coming.

First I spelled it "omnibulation." When I realized that, I had to delete the item from my Zazzle store and create it with the correct spelling. Then, even though the spelling was right on the shirt (or so I thought), I misspelled it in the product title, so the URL had it wrong, even after I corrected the product title. So I created it for the third time, making sure ALL the spelling was correct.

Except it wasn't.

Hours later I discovered I still got it wrong, so I've had to do it over for a fourth time. This is getting ridiculous. At least Dick Ford spelled it right in his Punday post, so I copied and pasted "OBNUBILATE" from his post and changed the final "e" to "ion." I have no idea why this word has posed such problems for me. I think what's happening is that for so many years I typed quite accurately - I spent 18 years doing typesetting and pagination - and could cope with obscure spellings and such. I'll just have to proofread everything far more thoroughly especially if I'm expecting to sell stuff with words on it.

After all that, I realized the URL for this post still had the incorrect spelling, so I had to copy the picture and text, delete the post, then post it again. Will this never end?