Public of Hairs

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the typos. I am about to go public with one that was just a hair off, resulting in plenty of pub.

Image originally posted to Twitter by Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune

My friend Chas, of the It’s Filmed There website, e-mailed me a link to a Yahoo! News story a year ago. I opened the link immediately, and by that time the story already had more than 3,500 comments. That’s understandable. This is comic gold. So, without further ado, let the commencement-program jokes commence:

• This must be a private matter, because it sure as heck isn’t public.

• Waiter, there’s a hair in my commencement program!

• Did it have to be President Johnson?

• I’ve got a pubic bone to pick with you, University of Texas.

• It’s public record: Public is a wrecked word.

I can go on (Unlimited Possibilities), but I won’t. It’s time to get serious, to get to the root of the problem. A hair is out of place. Actually, a letter has been misplaced. An L has been plucked from the nether regions of a certain word. Public, it turns out, is losing hair; the word has a bald spot. Yikes.

Someone aired a hairy error. Yes, “public affairs” sounds a bit like “pubic hairs.” So, are we splitting hairs? No. Not when the bad hair day occurs on the cover of a commencement program at Texas’ flagship university, in the pubic public eye.

We all err from time to time, and this hair folly is nothing more than follicle fallibility. Still, it’s not every day an L falling out results in such humorous fallout. The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a graduate school at the University of Texas, may need a top-notch PR firm to handle this hair-raising situation. PR is short for public relations, not, well, you know.