“Great Googly-Moogly!”

There’s an “h” at the end of Pittsburgh, moron.

It’s generally considered a self-inflicted pie in the face to make oneself look like an idiot while calling others out as idiots. By me, at least.

Which is why I had that horrific, dropping-from-an-airplane-with-no-‘chute feeling when I received the message this morning from my friend Karen, a seasoned writer and copyeditor.

“Pittsburgh has an H. :)” she direct messaged me via Twitter.

Great Googly-Moogly!

I knew immediately what she was referring to – “Peublo? Pittsburgh? Paris… Accord.” – last week’s post about President Joe Biden’s executive order to move the USA toward re-entering the Paris Climate Accord. In it, I called out the foolish, false equivalency Twitter posts about Biden’s action from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.

Except, as Karen astutely pointed out, my headline read, “Pueblo? Pittsburg? Paris…,” instead.

Sure enough, I’d left the “h” off of Pittsburgh. Not only did I leave it off the Pittsburgh in the headline, an error I might plausibly have laughed off as a simple typo, but I’d left it off of the five mentions of Pittsburgh in the body of the post, as well.

Suddenly I was the 1996 grounds crew member for the Kansas City Chiefs football team. That poor guy made one of the greatest misspelling mistakes in the history of U.S. football, if not the English language.

If you’re not familiar with the classic Snickers TV commercial, you should check it out.

“Not goin’ anywhere for a while?” the voiceover asks, suggesting it’s going to take a long time to start over on the endzone paint job. “Grab a Snickers.”

Great advertising concept. Not only is it hilarious and therefore memorable, it’s also based on the Snickers brand idea that people who are going to be stuck in meetings or at work or wherever need something filling, like a Snickers candy bar, to tide them over until their delayed mealtime.

They are packed with peanuts, you know.

They really are satisfying.

Great advertising aside, there I was this morning, searching for “Pittsburg” mentions throughout the post and adding an “h” to every one. It didn’t take me all that long. I didn’t feel the need to eat a Snickers. (Quite the opposite, actually. And I mean that literally.)

However, I’d shared the post all over the place on IV Words’ Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. No way I’d ever be able to find all those posts, and even if I could it would take hours I don’t have, and even if I changed the language in the posts the platforms wouldn’t change the original embedded, misspelled headline.

I was still watching that airplane fade to a speck in the sky above.

Well, at least my post isn’t in the Super Bowl this weekend. At least I didn’t push The Big Lie to hundreds of thousands of people and encourage an armed insurrection against the USA. And at least I haven’t made a fool of myself by refusing to walk through a metal detector because I’m trying to carry a concealed weapon onto the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Something like that would be truly embarrassing.

Still…

Great Googly Moogly!

Thanks again, Karen.

To the citizens of the great city of Pittsburgh, my deepest, sincerest apologies. And to the football team and its fans in Kansas City… GO CHEFS!

Finally, my proclivity for poor spelling aside, Cruz and Boebert are still idiots.

Now, if the rest of you will excuse me, I’m just going to lick some of this humble pie off my face….

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