a grave, erronymous mistake

I need a word to tell a story, but it doesn't seem to exist so let's start by making one up:

erronym /əˈrɑːnɪm/ n.
a typo that completely reverses the meaning of a sentence.

In 1631, royal printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas accidentally printed 1000+ King James Bibles with an excellent typo.

Thou shalt commit adultery.

as you might imagine, the church had nearly all the books burned, fined the holy shit outta the men responsible and ruined their lives.

The £300 fine was so great (nearly ~£60,000 in today's money) that Barker ended up in debtor's prison, where he soon died, cause, you know, 1600's English prisons were not fucking around. 💀

there is a long-running theory that his great rival Bonham Norton may have had the error engineered in order to embarrass Robert Barker and fuck him over. That same edition also had a typo where "greatness of God" became "great-asse of God", which seems to support the idea that this was sabotague.

Also, when all the dust had settled, guess who was the new King's Printer? That's right, motherfuckin' Bonham Norton. I mean, I don't know if any of this is true but excuse me hollywood whyyyy haven't you made a movie about this??

Known today as The Wicked Bible, this book contained the most expensive erronym ever made.