History ThrowItIn / RealLIfe

* The annual holiday practice of "tracking Santa" at [=NORAD=] supposedly got started because of a typo. In 1955, a Sears advertisement that ran in a Colorado Springs newspaper accidentally printed the phone number for the Continental Air Defense Command in place of a talk-to-Santa hotline for kids. Deluged on his private high-security line by children's Christmas Eve calls for St. Nick, Col. Harry Shoup didn't have the heart to disappoint them, so played along and instructed his staff to give such callers reports on Santa's progress throughout the night. A tradition was born, first as a seasonal call-in line to [=CONAD=] and its successor, manned by generations of volunteers from the U.S. armed forces, and currently as the noradtrackssanta website.[[note]]Other versions of the story stated that the number was printed correctly and a kid just misdialled the number. The call was resolved quickly and no other calls came in, but Shoup saw a public relations opportunity and decided to start the Santa tracking business.[[/note]]

* Henny Youngman, the BorschtBelt comedian's famous line, "Take my wife... please!" (as heard in ''Film/{{Goodfellas}}'') was the result of a misunderstanding. Youngman was directing an usher to take his wife to her seat for the show, but the request was treated as a joke. Since the line fit his [[AwfulWeddedLife style of comedy]] so perfectly, he turned it into his {{catchphrase}}.

* In 1773, a horse racer named Willoughby Bertie bred a horse whom he named Potatoes. The boy he asked to write the horse's name down thought it was spelt "pot and eight 'o's", and wrote it as "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potoooooooo Potoooooooo]]" on its feed bin, and Bertie found it funny enough to keep that way.
* Artist/FrankKozik created Labbit in the 90s, using the character in his rock music poster art. In 2000, he entered talks to sell the character as a toy with Japanese manufacturer Bounty Hunter. Kozik had intended to call it the Smokin' Rabbit, but [[JapaneseRanguage the company accidentally called it the Smorkin' Labbit]], which Kozik loved so much he made it official.

* Evolution works on this concept as every mutation is random. What works is passed on to the next generation and what doesn't is, most of the time, discarded. There are still a few "errors" that simply are not enough of a threat to be actively erased. For example, giraffes have an incredibly long laryngeal nerve running down and back up their neck when it could just be a few centimeters long instead because the nerve evolved from fishes' ones where they needed to do a loop to cover the operculum.

* A ''lot'' of extensible, free-as-in-freedom software (some call it Open Source), ends up like this. Prominent examples are Emacs and [=UNIX=] (though originally it was proprietary; only with the [=GNU=] project has the licensing been cleared up and extensibility preserved). Other examples include the [=LISP=] programming language (especially in previous versions, where it was localized in certain areas (e.g. [=MAClisp=] (no relation to the Macintosh) in the [=MIT AI=] lab) --recently, it's manifested in de-facto standard libraries) , probably because of its built-in extensibility (with defmacro)

* In 1773, a horse racer named Willoughby Bertie bred a horse whom he named Potatoes. The boy he asked to write the horse's name down thought it was spelt "pot and eight 'o's", and wrote it as "Potoooooooo" on its feed bin, and Bertie found it funny enough to keep that way.

* When Neil Armstrong reported landing in simulators during the training for Apollo 11, he always said "Houston, ''Eagle''. We have landed" or some close variation on that. When he actually got to the moon, he realized that something more poetic was necessary for such a historic moment and ad libbed "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The ''Eagle'' has landed" which no one else had ever heard. The communications officer in Houston was clearly surprised but responded "Roger, Tranquility." The name is now recognized by the International Astronomical Union.

* The annual holiday practice of "tracking Santa" at [=NORAD=] got started because of a typo. In 1955, a Sears advertisement that ran in a Colorado Springs newspaper accidentally printed the phone number for the Continental Air Defense Command in place of a talk-to-Santa hotline for kids. Deluged on his private high-security line by children's Christmas Eve calls for St. Nick, Col. Harry Shoup didn't have the heart to disappoint them, so played along and instructed his staff to give such callers reports on Santa's progress throughout the night. A tradition was born, first as a seasonal call-in line to [=CONAD=] and its successor, manned by generations of volunteers from the U.S. armed forces, and currently as the noradtrackssanta website.