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written by Sam Greenspan

H&M recently released a t-shirt featuring a Thomas Edison quote with a glaring spelling mistake.

Alanis Morissette would love this almost-irony.

H&M recently released a t-shirt featuring the famous Thomas Edison quote. “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Let’s have a look…

Woof. Spelling “genius” with an “o” is like spelling “Yale” with a “6.”

Unfortunately for the less-than-diligent Swedes at H&M, the erroneous t-shirt inexplicably made it through every step of the process — development, production, photographs, sales — and remained on sale for at least a month before someone finally noticed.

They just pulled the shirt from their online catalog (and, presumably, from stores) — but there was a problem. One of their handsome dudes wore the shirt while modeling other products, like some geometric pattern shorts and whatnot. So the shirt persists in their catalog for now, not for sale, but just as a painful reminder that one erroneous vowel.

In another bout of almost-irony, this is a fairly short and un-insightful blog post, the basis of which was about 84 percent inspiration and 18 percent perspiration, with a two percent margin of error. (Adding that margin of error joke made me feel better about the perspiration aspect. I’m through the looking glass, guys.)