It is cancellation week in the US tv world. By now most know that Zero Hour or Private Practice or 90210 won’t be back in September with new episodes so this is, at least for now, omitting the months-ago-announced cancellations from this season. Probably the most shocking cancellation announced this week has been that of Southland, the critically acclaimed police drama that is like nothing else on tv for its blunt realism.

Among the renewals this week are Defiance (Syfy/Showcase), Criminal Minds (CBS/CTV), Nikita (The CW/CTV two), and yes even The Carrie Diaries (The CW/City).

So far still stuck on the proverbial fence is are most of the ABC schedule, Hannibal (AXN/City), The New Normal (NBC/CTV), and The Cleveland Show (FOX/Global) . When word on the fate of Hannibal will be known is uncertain since it isn’t exactly an NBC series though NBC is the American broadcaster of the show which is set in America.  In recent years Sony has started to commission original programming for their AXN network of channels that cover much of the planet excluding Canada and USA. This year their show is Hannibal; last year it was The Firm, which was also picked up by NBC.

Somewhat noticeably absent from the list of new shows picked up is the latest spin-off  in the JAG family, the somewhat disappointing NCIS: Red or whatever they were going to settle on as the title. Shows in that fictional universe have a habit of lasting at least 10 seasons and being quite popular. NCIS: Red just didn’t seem like it could survive even 10% of that. This doesn’t mean it won’t be picked up. It just means there has not yet been an early announcement in advance of CBS’s 2013-14 Up-front announcement on 15 May.

With the censoring of Hannibal on NBC and City in the USA and Canada a little something funny has happened. The title of the censored episode made available in quasi-sanitised snippets on NBC.com and Hulu.com is Œuf. Most Americans use character sets for websites and language settings on their keyboards which exclude the character Œ from being rendered properly or being typeable. Most Americans have probably never encountered the character prior to its usage in the title of this episode of Hannibal and presume the latter half of that character which is an upper-case E is its own character and should be lower-case. The former half of that character is an upper-case O not C. The characters œ, Œ, æ, Æ are archaic in contemporary American but are still used in European and Canadian English and even more so in French and some other languages of Europe.

If using a character set that does not support Œ the proper rendering would be “Oe” as in Oeuf, which is French for egg. What someone at NBC has done is take Œ and make it “Ce” and Americans have blindly and obediently followed as it has appeared on all manner of blogs and newspapers and even the likes of IMDb have changed to embrace the typo after previously having it correct. Ceuf is all over Hulu.com and NBC.com, which are the “official sites” for the information and it is all wrong. It is a mega massive perpetuation of a typographical error.

The titles of the episodes of Hannibal are all relating to food and are all in French. Ceuf is French for not a damn thing and only exists as the American bastardisation of the title of this episode of Hannibal. It is such a unique word that if you type it into Google.com or Google.ca it returns nothing but results for the show Hannibal. Americans have apparently accidentally, inadvertently, and ignorantly created their own word which has no meaning at this time.

Anyone who is vaguely familiar with French knows that Americans have grossly messed this up. On all of the AXN websites it is either Œuf or Oeuf depending on the character set used for whatever the language of the website allows for. The City website has recently added the cannibalised remnants of the episode and it unsurprisingly follows the American lead on this. Could this be the largest typo ever?