Poor proofing or deliberate tactic?

Published on Tuesday, 14 March 2023.
At 267 words, this article should take about 1 minute to read.

I was reading through the news the other day; quite a lot on the recent "BBC vs Gary Lineker"^↗ debacle and I noticed this in an article…

The publication spells Lineker's name three different ways which got me to thinking…

Is this more likely to be poor proofing or a deliberate tactic?

The publication in question (I won't name them here) isn't a shoddy sort of operation - usually. I've never noticed this before from them. On the other hand, it was very "breaking" news so standards may have slipped in the urgency to get content out while it was hot.

As a tactic though, and at the risk of invoking Betteridge's Law^↗…

Could an editorial decision have been made to deliberately insert common misspellings to pick up traffic from typos in searches?

Probably not but is it such a ridiculous idea? "Lineker" isn't the easiest name to spell - especially if you've only heard^↗ it before. I've had to double check every time I've written it in this article that it is spelled correctly (wouldn't want someone to write an article about my speling! 🤪)

The human brain is very good at skipping over^↗ and fill in the blanks^↗ so it wouldn't be jarringly obvious to most people that his name was incorrect a few times.

I don't see it beyond the realm of possibility that someone chose to add the misspellings on purpose.

In related news, does anyone remember Fatfingers for eBay^↗? I got a few pairs of Doctor Martins and Conserve All Stars using that nifty tool. Really pleased to see it's still up!