Perlman posits that all the ridicule over typos indicates that readers care very much for perfect, copy-edited prose, but I’d be willing to bet what it actually indicates is something far more Internet-y: The chance to make fun of something that’s registered as both incorrect and often funny (like Amercia or buttscotch, or when public becomes pubic, or mormon becomes, in The New York Times no less, moron); the chance to interact with your media in a way that shows you have an insight into how the sausage has been improperly made. The chance to find a mistake, and make it go viral. It’s copy schadenfreude, if you can spell it, and this, in many ways now, is how blog posts themselves are made (see all the brouhaha over Amercia).
