Everyone knows typos that happen over and over again. Which are practically programmed in the fingers or in the keyboard. You know that before you type the word, and you still spell it wrong. Just like you are guaranteed to ride your bike over a stone that you can already see from afar, want to avoid it at all costs and then promptly hit it exactly. Baptismal churches instead of baptismal churches. Landkresi or Landkries instead of Landkreis. And Dusiburg is also a spelling plague. Fortunately, such idiosyncratic but stubborn spellings are circled in red on the screen and call for a quick correction. This is different for place-name signs.
Anyone who now believes that no one is hanging up a sign with baptismal churches in the district of Munich should be told: That’s right, that didn’t exist yet. However, the entrance to Oberschleißheim was recently marked with a beautiful new yellow sign that said: Oberschlussheim. No one had noticed this transposed letter before assembly. They were probably too happy about the delivery of the new place name sign after the old sign had been stolen. In Oberschleißheim they take it with humor and are very happy that it was only an “Oberschlussheim” and that the manufacturers didn’t leave out the “l” instead. Unforgotten is the headline of a free Austrian newspaper the day after the red-white-red EM 2008 defeat against the Löw-Elf: “Ballack craps Germany into the quarter-finals”.
The people of Oberschleißheim aren’t the only ones with their poorly spelled street sign who don’t even know their own place names. It happens more often than you might think that nobody seems to be checking what some people here are up to. In the district of Göppingen, an “R” has crept into the sign of Reichenbach im Täle (that’s right!) and assigned the small town to the district of Gröppingen. In Berlin, on the other hand, people were sparing with the lettering, where instead of Reinickendorf it was simply called Reickendorf. And when the place name sign for the community “Lederhose” was written, the manufacturer probably laughed so hard at the place name that an “e” was forgotten when referring to Neuensorga, which is two kilometers away. It’s probably just some program’s autocorrect that’s to blame. We are already looking forward to the new town sign for Bruchköbel near Hanau. From this community, the computer automatically always makes “belly button piercing”.