The Law of Statistics

Slow day in Typoland, but I have got this.

Jim and I got married last August, as you may recall. We ordered from the government a couple of wallet-sized copies of the marriage certificate, just in case. Last week, Jim noticed that they never had arrived, so a couple of phone calls later, I discovered that 1) my credit card had been charged for them and 2) the government person to whom I needed to speak wasn't in but would call me back within twenty-four hours (but did not).

That very day, by one of those strange coincidences, an envelope from the government arrived in the mail. There was a form that needed to be signed! And we hadn't signed it! Because it had gotten lost somehow! I won't bore you with the details (except to say that the judge who married us was very nice about the form, and very irritated by the Vital Statistics people, who had apparently known in November that the form was incomplete but waited until January to do anything about it), but we finally got every signature we needed and put the thing in the envelope.

Ah, the envelope. The addressee on the English side reads:

Registrar General of Vital Statistics

and on the French side reads

Registraire Général des Statitiques de L'État Civil

and yes, that's "statitiques" instead of "statistiques". It's a sad thing when even the government can't be troubled to have a proofreader on hand.