Are there any notable examples of major historical documents with spelling and grammatical errors?

by dar212
sowser

You will find that North American slave narratives can sometimes contain quite a lot of errors that we would today be quite alarmed by in a book or pamphlet. Generally speaking, this is either because the author uses a slightly more colloquial turn of phrase that seems more natural ('speedly' instead of 'speedily' for instance), the word is very easily misspelled ('sheperd' instead of 'shepherd') or it is a typo that was missed or not worth correcting (an extra letter or a letter missing).

One of my personal favourites is the narrative William Walker, edited by Thomas Gaines and published in 1892; despite being riddled with small typos and simple spelling mistakes throughout, the latin term "ignis fatuus" (which I spent a good 15 minutes trying to decode, assuming it was a horrific typo, before looking it up) is rendered perfectly, which I can't help but find a little bit entertaining.

CopperRoyce

sure, schrivner's errors are somewhat common when you rely on handwriting. The constitution even has a few (it's v its eg). The problem is most of these questions don't really raise interesting political questions. Schrivner's errors don't have legal significance; however, if there is some debate over the substance of the claim (for instance King Burwell) things get tricky as interpretations can see somewhat questionable use or nonuse of this doctrine to avoid larger constitutional questions . But that's a much bigger topic than your asking and i can't think of any legislation resulting from direct constitutional mispellings, bad grammar or omitted words.

That being said, it's somewhat obvious that the grammatical construction of the second amendment matters a great deal politically for political arguments about the founding father's intent.

http://www.usconstitution.net/constmiss.html

gingerkid1234

Sorry, we don't allow throughout history questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.