Most people doing philosophy become aware of typographical mistakes that should be avoided. Confusing “causal” and “casual” is one of them, maybe indeed the most famous.
I’ve become aware of two ones that are new to me. For reasons I do not understand, my mac airbook leads me to type “spa” for “apa”. The other is due to the automatic correcting that computers go in for. For example, mac insists on “neurotics” for “neuroethics.” So you might get an invitation from me for a spa meeting in New Orleans in February, 2013 for neurotics.
Anyone else have new problems? Or perhaps you could remind us of some interesting old ones.
Feminist Philosophers 
I have read many student essays on the pubic/private distinction.
Jender, how funny. It reminds me of a story I heard long ago of someone reading an A-levels paper about the specter of communism spreading its testicles across Europe.
Just this morning my ipad assumed that when I typed ‘yonic’ I really meant ‘homicide’.
I once had a student submit a paper that regularly mentioned Descartes’ Medications.
“Asses” and “posses” show up with regularity as well (due to a dropped ‘s’, I hope!).
This is a new feature in Mac OS X Lion that they copied to the desktop software from the iOS mobile software. I’m finding that it mostly gets in my way, honestly. It makes sense on the phone because you typo so often there, but on the desktop with a keyboard, typos are the exception rather than the rule, so it ends up miscorrecting non-standard words more often than it fixes true typos. I think there’s a way to turn it off if you poke around in the System Preferences.
Google “Damn you autocorrect” for more examples if you want a chuckle.
old fashioned spell check turned one of my grad school profs’ name into “My honey.” He was a priest. And I wrote papers for that class in the wee hours of the morning…
This is a homophone problem rather than an autocorrect problem. But I’ve read a million papers (and I’m sure others have too) about Bentham’s “Principals of Morals and Legislation”. An easy mistake to make, but then again, you’ve got the book right in front of you…
A bad spell of ‘literacy’ just became ‘elite racy’.
My favorite has always been students writing about Plato on the immoral soul.
autocorrect changed ‘uncontentious’ into ‘contentious’ when i was writing something the other day. eek.
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