'Oh no, I spelled it wrong': Nurse runs solo marathon in shape of 'Boston Strog' | Hacker News Reader

'Oh no, I spelled it wrong': Nurse runs solo marathon in shape of 'Boston Strog'

cbc.ca

110 pointsmgsouth48 comments

See also: the Brookyln Bridge poster -

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cameronmoll/the-brookly...

That's pretty funny, I had to do a second take to notice the typo. I wonder if it's because there aren't any modern words that end in -lyn or are close to brooklyn.

Yes! Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6967978

Happens all the time when you are type setting, like writing in LaTeX. Its not designed to be your word processor and its easy to think you making minor edits/fixes when you are really quietly destroying everything you had already revised dozens of times.

What’s a good alternative workflow? I’d be quite interested to know as what you said identifies with what I’ve experienced.

I think getting your source file into Github and having it go through peer-review is the best way to avoid these types of issues. Also changing the diff format from 'diff-by-line' to 'diff-by-word' improves readability a lot.

Call me a cynic but these days it just seems like “mistakes” like these and the many examples from commercials and games must be deliberate. I mean why try to aim for something flawless when intentional mistakes can help make your content go viral.

It's a painful "mistake". Running a marathon is painful. Your legs run out of glycogen after about 30km and all you can think of is "I want to stop". I'm surprised her mind was sharp enough to pick up the mistake.

Time: 3h 46m, pace: 5:21. That's fast for what is more like a training run. She could probably do solid 5:00 pace in a real competition.

https://www.strava.com/activities/3326004383

I think parent meant that it may have been planned before the actual running. Also, forgetting one letter is less painful than having surplus letters.

By the way, if you look at that map, the path would require more spacing between the O and the G, because the vertical pillars of N would otherwise overlap with the vertical lines in O and G. Compare with the spacing between O and N in "BOSTON".

> 3h 46m, pace: 5:21

For the Americans like me who are briefly confused, that is per km pace. More like 8:37 per mile.

One can train the body to burn some fat when running even when glycogen stores are full. That allows to push the depletion phase past the marathon distance. But according to my buddy who runs marathons such training is in itself is rather painful.

I thought this about the Tesla truck with broken windows too. I'm unsure about the intention, but I definitely paid more attention to it and shared it more because of this.

Likewise with "leaks" about new products, games etc. On the one hand, genuine leaks do happen and are devastating for the teams that have to see their work exposed to the world half-baked and unpolished. On the other hand, a "leak" about the new iPhone that shows half a dozen professional glamour shots of the hardware plus some breathless adulation of the specs might just possibly have not have been entirely accidental.

And let's not forget sex tapes. "Attention is the new currency."

My favourite spelling mistake is from the Nottingham County Gaol and is all the worse for being set in stone:

https://i.imgur.com/h6XiZE3.jpg

Take a close look at the word "gaol". Originally, the stone mason spelt it as goal and had to try to tidy it up as best he could.

Hats off to her.

I ran a marathon-distance run each of the last four weekends and all I managed to spell was "O".

Good way to escape the news cycle for a few hours!

>It took Lindsay Devers months of training and meticulous planning to plot out her marathon-length run along the Boston riverside to spell out an inspirational message for her city.

But in the end, she forgot one important thing — the letter N.

QA failure :) She had multiple friends look over the plan, and everybody missed it.

Sounds like BS. Probably just a publicity stunt. I mean, if you draw out the route first, you clearly are gonna notice the N missing. Only way this is believable is if she didn't draw it out first. That seems a rather arcane way to plan something (as verbal directions -- turn here, turn there, etc..) I think any sane person would just draw it out like a maze.

You can see where she should’ve started the S but didn’t go far enough. Then must’ve seen the park and run the G as planned.

?? The N is missing. Not the S

I’m saying she planned to start the S one block further on to the left of the image but messed up at some point. She knew she needed to finish the G before the park. So she started the S in the wrong place, continued TRO and then thought she must’ve been up to the G given the park was in sight. If she started the S a block to the left, it would’ve been centred with BOSTON.

Lots of good weirdness out there in the ultra running world. This dude ran 70k around his kitchen table! https://twitter.com/kilianj/status/1253576272707551232

Wow, a considerably smaller radius than the race that runs around one city block over 5,000 times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Transcendence_3100_Mile_R...

"Boston strog" is how you would say "Boston Strong" if you had a cold, perhaps.

Cute.

Precisely: my first thought was of Guys and Dolls, and "A Person Could Develop a Cold".

That would be "Bostod Strog"

So it would be how you would sound out "Boston Strong" if you developed a cold half way through the marathon haha.

> All these times that we are currently having are so uncertain and I just wanted to, like, show that there's a little bit of normalcy still in life.

What’s more normal than a very public typo?

It least it wasn't Boston Strogg.

So we can rule out she's a Quake fan?

Owning a mistake like that so openly is pretty inspiring, in an already upbeat story.

Tangentially related: I rode cross country (on a bike) from SF to NYC, and on the last day when I arrived in Manhattan (around 3 or 4am, I think) I decided to write LOL in SoHo with the GPS.

If you happen to have a Strava account (I don't use Strava anymore) you can see it here by zooming in on Manhattan: https://www.strava.com/activities/685757465

Edit: just realized it's also available from Garmin: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1316969958

of course so much better than if she did it right, imagine the fun laughter someday if you wore this as a t-shirt at the race

but seriously, wtf who registered the domain name?!

“That’s great! But who are the Chefs?”

https://youtu.be/m9zQLSS9LHw

"Oops, look at me!"

Ironically enough, they also spelt the title wrong too.

I guess this is one of those en-US-vs-the-rest-of-the-english-speaking-world weirdnesses? I've never seen/heard "spelled" before in my native-English-speaking life as far I can remember.

British is spelt. US is spelled. [1] [2]

1 - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spell

2 - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spelt

The CBC should be using British spelling!!

Canadian spelling is a hybrid of British and American. For example, centre not center, but aluminum not aluminum.

For this particular word (spelled/spelt), British spelling allows both forms interchangeably, with spelled mildly preferred in Canada but both may be found:

https://grammarist.com/spelling/spelled-spelt/

> aluminum not aluminum

Looks like you mean "aluminum not aluminium"?

Hah, yes. Thanks for the important correction!

I wonder if there's an east/west variation on usage in Canada. Out west here I've only seen spelled (and other similar words with ed rather than t) used. I suspect the closer to the maritime provinces you get, the more British influence on the usage.

Perhaps they used the American spelling because they’re quoting an American?

Americans almost never use "spelt", but in British English, "spelled" and "spelt" are both considered correct.

On the contrary, that’s the name of the grain, so that’s what I use. :-)

Plenty of these:

speeded vs sped / spilled vs spilt / learned vs learnt

https://www.englishpage.com/irregularverbs/irregularverbs.ht...

Not sure if its a purely US vs common wealth thing, there seems to be plenty of variation within the populations of both.

I always used speeded for the past tense of "speeding" as in breaking the speed limit and sped as the past tense of "speeding" as in the phrase "speeding past". Similar to hang/hung/hanged where hung is the past tense of hang unless in the context of hanging the form of execution, whose past tense is hanged. I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon.

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