dubious county

doug caught this glorious typo in letter that the governor sent today to USDOT (emphasis doug's):

Daviess, Dubious [sic], Knox, Martin, and Pike Counties in Southwest Indiana belong in the Eastern Standard [sic] time zone.

this is my favorite kind of typo: one where the misspelling becomes a different word, with unintended humorous connotations. my professional intuition tells me that this error was most likely caused by an overzealous spell-check: msword suggested "Dubious" instead of the correct "Dubois" and some flack mistakenly clicked "replace". but that doesn't make it any less entertaining.

"dubious county" would be a fantastic slur against dubois county, though i'm not sure what would be dubious about it. i'm sure dubois haters could come up with something. (maybe one of those anti-french slurs the right illogically clings to.)

personally, i have a passing familiarity with dubois county, as my mother got her master's degree at st meinrad in nearby spencer county, so i've been to jasper a few times, and dubois struck me as a perfectly nice rural county. so i'm not hating on dubois, though if i were, i would have some awesome new ammunition.

doug pointed out this typo in the middle of a longer post about the governor's letter, supporting six counties in their bids to switch to eastern time after having been put on central earlier this year. doug's post has some excellent analysis of the letter, examining the governor's disingenuous arguments and false claims. if you're not bored to tears with time zone talk, you should read his post: i won't do it the injustice of rehashing all his points here.

but doug merely highlights the typo with a subtle [sic]. he says nothing more about it, and definitely doesn't point out its poetic beauty. nor do any of his commenters so far. i couldn't let that pass; i couldn't allow such a wonderful error to go unappreciated.¶