Suggesting David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan had this oversight is pretty funny. These are two incredibly well respected computer scientists, Brian Kernighan being one of the main contributers to inventing C and Unix.
This whole article sounds to me like a prank they made. There are too many things that don't make sense. I wonder if they're making fun of a whole generation that doesn't know how a typewriter works.
Kernighan also wrote Pic, a *roff/*TeX preprocessor. He knows a thing or two about typesetting. And, obviously, he's the 'K' in AWK.