OK, let's get ahead of this nonsense this year.
"ffi" is the Latin Small Ffi Ligature. It's a nice way of presenting two Fs and an I (say, in "efficient") without the various dots and ascenders mushing together. Most fonts have it, and you see it every day without noticing it.
"ffi" is the Latin Small Ffi Ligature. It's a nice way of presenting two Fs and an I (say, in "efficient") without the various dots and ascenders mushing together. Most fonts have it, and you see it every day without noticing it.
Usually they just look nice and get out of the way, but ligatures can cause problems, say when a passage in a book is supposed to look like it's written on a typewriter but the typesetter forgot to turn them off. No typewriter has an "fi" key.
And usually they're added in automatically, rather than being encoded in the text, but sometimes (as in the tweets above) you can put them in explicitly, and that can cause problems when a font doesn't have that ligature. You might get a box, a font change, "?" or nothing at all.
Which brings us to this cracker joke which you are going to see a lot on the internet over the next month. It's not the joke as intended, but it's not really a typo either—who forgets to type three consecutive letters? It's "coffin medicine" rendered in a font with no "ffi" glyph.
This also explains how this error got into the product: almost certainly the joke *was* proof-read, but in a font where it rendered correctly and made perfect sense. I mean obviously it still wasn't *funny*, but it's a cracker joke, they're not supposed to be funny.
They are supposed to basically work as jokes, though, and this doesn't (in any font). "Cough medicine" shouldn't be in the setup. The first line should be "what does Dracula take when he has a sore throat" or similar. This is one step from "what cough medicine is like a coffin".
Of course, none of this excuses the fact that this is at least the third year this error has appeared, but I invite you to imagine an office of people dismantling boxes of crackers, finding the ones with this joke in it, and switching in a correction without breaking anything.
