The Public/Pubic Pitfall and Other Non-typo Typos

Lyrissa’s post yesterday about typos yesterday hit home with me, since I’ve fought a lifelong, and often losing, battle against them in my professional and personal writing.  My ally in this battle is the spellchecker, of course, without which my writing would be even more typo-ridden than it currently is.

But spellcheck can generate a false sense of security by convincing one that work is typo-free while failing to eliminate a particularly pernicious category of error:  the misspelling that happens to result in  a legit word.  E.g., I often write “form” when meaning “from,” and while this is a misspelling of the word I intended, “form” is a perfectly valid English-language word, regardless of intention, so spellcheck leaves the wrong word in.  I call this pernicious and persistent nemesis the non-typo typo.

The most salient, and embarrassing, example of this arose in an article I wrote a few years back about government speech.  The article invoked the idea of the public a lot, but I apparently have a tendency to leave out the letter “l” when speed-typing, hence I submitted an article that occasionally referred to, e.g., “pubic law”, “pubic discourse”, and most immortally, “the pubic function of speech in American democracy.”

So.  Have any other lawprofs out there been victimized by the non-typo typo?  Is there a solution to this I’m overlooking (besides, of course, careful attention to detail, which never quite seems to work, at least not all of the time)?  And are there other examples of non-typo typos out there as mortifying as the public/pubic pitfall?