Epic FAIL? Erm, actually no.

Since starting my Journalism degree at UCLan I have started to analyse and correct any spelling or grammatical errors I happen to come across. This could be in a newspaper, on an advertising board or even in some writing a friend may have done 6 years ago at High School. It's not always good being this picky for punctuation, my friends tell me to "Piss off" when I point out their missing commas. But I just think at least it will help me in the long run on the road to becoming a Journalist.

Now I also spend a lot of time on Internet forums. Usually for gaming purposes or for simply looking up/talking about the latest news articles. One of my usual haunts first thing in a morning is the website Digg. I like it because it's like a community spreading news from all over the world. Well it's meant to be, mostly it's just people pointing out the mistakes of others. Followed by heated comments below which usually end up in someone having to take a time-out.

A news item caught my eye, not because of the story or picture, but because the headline contained the words: 'Ironic FAIL'.

Here is the Digg story entitled: 'Ironic Fail [pic]'

This isn't going to be a post about the misuse of the word irony, no, that's for another blog. Instead this post is more to do with the FAIL.

FAIL is the new Internet buzzword which joins words like pwned which are thrown around the Internet for more than they should.

There are even sites entirely devoted to this kind of thing: Here

I'm not against the use of this word, but I am in this case because the article it describes is not a FAIL at all. The article in question is a picture of a newspaper clipping which shows the headline: 'Missippi's literacy program shows improvement'. With the word 'Missippi's' marked in yellow marker, as a spelling mistake. The comments for this story are flooded with people laughing at the irony of an article about an improvement in literacy including a spelling error.

But is it actually an error? No, it's not. Missippi is actually Southern slang for Mississippi, and so gives the writer a much shorter word to fit into their headline than having to write out 'Mississippi'. Yes nobody seems to care, they're all caught up in the joke to notice they don't really have anything to joke about.

*Update*
I posted a comment on the aforementioned article basically saying what I just said (but in the space of one line) and also noticed that 1 or 2 other people have also pointed out that this isn't a misspelling. I just re-checked the comments and all of our comments have been Dugg-down, which just goes to show how idiotic some people are. They'd rather discard the truth so they can carry on having a laugh.