Or it could just be homonym replacement when typing. I know I'm very prone to it.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:04 PM by Aaron Bergman

he was the hunter, and she his query

ROTFLMAO!

This gives a whole new imagery to query letters.

Woot!

Posted May 1, 2006 12:05 PM by Greg London

One of my former law school professors recalled a student handing in an essay test answer that included the line, "It's a Doggy-Dog world."

The professor didn't count this observation against the student, though. "After all," she said, "it *is* a Doggy-Dog world."

Then she sighed and took another sip of her drink.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:14 PM by Maud

From one of my fellow members of the local writing group:

"Their cloaks bellowed behind them."

Given a strong enough wind, that might happen....

Posted May 1, 2006 12:17 PM by Renee

At the top of my list is the ever-popular:

"for all intensive purposes"

Posted May 1, 2006 12:26 PM by Tara

"Wallah!" in tones of triumph. Or "Viola," ditto. This led to my current favorite, "VYE-OH-LAH!" But she'd just finished her first sock, so I forgave her.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:29 PM by TexAnne

I suspect that many of these are caused by spell-checkers-gone-horribly-wrong.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:32 PM by James D. Macdonald

The phrase which always makes me wince is "very unique".

Posted May 1, 2006 12:33 PM by Bill Hooker

(Which I realise is not a phonetic near-miss; I just had to vent.)

Posted May 1, 2006 12:34 PM by Bill Hooker

One I have started to see more often: "reign" for "rein", as in "reign in one's enthusiasm." (I never see "rain" in the same spot, however. Interesting.)

Posted May 1, 2006 12:41 PM by Lizzy L

These kinds of phrases are a huge source of amusement to the linguistics & language blogging communities. They're usually called "eggcorns" - a common near-miss for "acorn". There's now a database with a short history included. Endless linguisticky fun!

Posted May 1, 2006 12:45 PM by Sarah Sabine

Actually, I kind of like the sound of "empirical storm troopers." We could use some butt-kicking fact-checkers like them if we ever hope to expand the borders of the reality-based community.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:46 PM by SteveE

I suspect some of these (passed history not with standing, the illusive details) fall into the category of what the folks over at Language Log call "eggcorns". You might enjoy the Eggcorn Database.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:46 PM by Naomi Parkhurst

Sorry! Forgot to check if someone else had posted the same thing while I was typing mine up.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:47 PM by Naomi Parkhurst

Some of these qualify as eggcorns. That database is a think of beauty.

(spelling intended!)

Posted May 1, 2006 12:48 PM by Grant Barrett

Can I put in a vote for "forward," used as a heading for the bit in the front of a book? Published books, by major presses?

Gah.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:49 PM by Kate Nepveu

Dern, me too, Naomi.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:49 PM by Grant Barrett

"Who told you you're allowed to rein in my parade?"

This actually led to a pretty good pun when Diana Ross's concert in Central Park was rained out. She told everybody she was going to have to stop, and to please leave the park in an orderly fashion, but she kept singing while they did. Getting soaked the while. The Post, which I normally hate, headlined the story as "Diana Rains Supreme." Now that's just brilliant.

I'm driven crazy by the little common ones, like "This has lead to..."

Posted May 1, 2006 12:50 PM by Xopher

I so want someone to write me a story titled:

"he was the hunter, and she his query"

It makes me giggle every time I read it.

JK

Posted May 1, 2006 12:52 PM by John Klima

When I just started out, I made few of those typoes. The more I write, the more frequently I see them.

My most common is inserting "eyes" instead of "eye". I honestly cannot get rid of it. At least I'm not the only one - for awhile there the misspelling of idiot as didot was so common, didot actually became a slang word among OWW writers :)

Posted May 1, 2006 12:53 PM by Ilona

When I started where I work now, they had advice to "treat this client with kit gloves..." ARGH. It was even put into our project outlines.

And the Kansas City Star can be counted on to use the wrong homonym almost every time they use one. (hair, hare, heir; there, their; etc.). When she retired, my mother-in-law, took it upon herself to write correction letters to them. Good hobby, it isn't helping.

Posted May 1, 2006 12:56 PM by Paula Helm Murray

One can never have too much support for Language Log or the Eggcorn Database! I think my favorite eggcorns are the ones that, to modern speakers, make *more* sense than the originals. While mistakes like these can be annoying, some of them make me marvel at the flexibility of our language. For example, "deep-seeded" for "deep-seated":

And in terms of the current ordinary-language meaning of the words involved, “deep-seeded ignorance” makes sense, while “deep-seated ignorance” doesn’t. Ignorance can be planted deep and thus have deep metaphorical roots, but deep-seated ignorance would have to be ignorance cut with a lot of room in the crotch, or maybe ignorance sitting in a badly-designed armchair. - Mark Liberman, of Language Log

Posted May 1, 2006 12:58 PM by Sarah Sabine

Add 'tow the line' to the list (unless someone's pulling the rope around).

Posted May 1, 2006 12:59 PM by P J Evans

Oh, I pulled one of these my first year in college. My sin? "Baited breath."

When the mistake was pointed out to me, I wanted to die. Fortunately I got over it enough to laugh hysterically.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:04 PM by Chryss

Oh, I could give you a whole lot more:

She galloped passed his manor.
The arrival of a somnambulist peaked/peeked his curiosity.
The mummies stood in a cue.
"Bare with me," said the stripper.
"I should of brought my trebuchet," Melvin said.
"I should never have excepted his application as viceroy," Bitsy mused.

And not that I expect everyone to spell perfectly in French, but:
Vlad makes boo-koo bucks.
I'll fetch your arsenic toot-sweet.

I also get testy about the confusion between affect and effect (since I teach science, this comes up a lot), or the misuse of nauseous (which means "to induce nausea") and nauseated. So if you say, "I'm nauseous," (meaning "I induce nausea") expect me to give you a funny look and to slowly back away.

More good 'uns on my site here:
Self Editing

Posted May 1, 2006 1:10 PM by Writerious

Oh, and we must not forget the ever-popular, "low and behold."

Posted May 1, 2006 1:14 PM by Writerious

"Copywritten." Although, for some reason, I hardly ever see "copywrite."

Posted May 1, 2006 1:15 PM by Tim Walters

I suspect this will happen moor and moor off in as speech recognition softwear seize wider usage.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:19 PM by Harry Connolly

James wrote: I suspect that many of these are caused by spell-checkers-gone-horribly-wrong.

Reminds me the time I wrote a response to a yearly review and my spell-checker asked about my manager's name whether it should be replaced by valuator or violator.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:22 PM by Serge

Oh, I don't know, Tim. There are people who write copy. Aren't they copywriters? And isn't their finished product copywritten when they're done? I mean, like, "I have that ad all designed and copywritten; now we just need the artwork."

Yes, I'm kidding.

Writerious, I'm pretty sure the boat has sailed on 'nauseous', much as I sympathize.

Chryss, I learned that one before I learned what the expression meant. I had a joke book containing the line "the cat ate cheese and waited beside the mousehole with baited breath." By the time I figured out why that was funny, I was pretty much vaccinated against that particular error.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:22 PM by Xopher

plaintiff melody

This sounds like something from Trial by Jury.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:29 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Reading the paper last week I saw a bit about the "pealing paint" in downtown Chapel Hill.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:32 PM by Dirty Davey

Fragano - Or a leitmotif from any civil-law movie.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:34 PM by Xopher

My favorite was on the evening news. The story was about a prison escape, and the graphic over the newscaster's shoulder showed bars and the phrase, "ON THE LAMB."

I kid you not.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:36 PM by Deborah Roggie

The following come from student essays:

It is incontinent to vote.

Love is something everyone indores.

The ration desires for knowledge and national eros.

Democracy has been running rapid in the Middle East over the past fifty years.

African Americans fall at the button of this category too.

Everyone won’t to live comfortable.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:36 PM by Fragano Ledgister

I'm fond of "web sight."

Posted May 1, 2006 1:36 PM by Laurence Roberts

plaintiff melody - a musical by Busby Berkley...

Posted May 1, 2006 1:38 PM by Serge

Xopher: You're right.

Dirty Davey: The editor should have had his neck (w)rung.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:40 PM by Fragano Ledgister

I still find myself typing speak my peace, despite having been corrected many times now that it's piece.

Then again, I have family in Mississippi; no matter how much I get told otherwise, my fingers automatically type it mischevious — because there IS an extra vowel in there if you were raised on the Gulf Coast. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:42 PM by ksgreer

The one that makes me shriek is when people proclaim that they balled their eyes out. That's not an image I wanted, whether it's with a melon-baller or in a more off-color sense. "My grandfather died, and I balled my eyes out." Well, we each deal with grief in personal ways, I suppose....

Posted May 1, 2006 1:47 PM by Mris

Similar-Sounding Cousins: A Comedy of Manors

Earnest is an ex-patriot Englishman, escaping from his sorted passed in New York. Jack is his wealthy American cousin (a reel blew bloodied type, to the manner bourne). When Earnest looses his job righting insincere rejection letters for TOR Books, he moves in with Jack in his stately sub urban home.

Hijinks insue.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:50 PM by Michael

I teach senior English in High School, the usual BritLit assortment, but with a focus on tying it all together with the history and sociology of the time. While it is shocking the number of these "near-misses" that show up, I'm convinced that, as James D. Macdonald mentioned at the beginning, these are spell-check related.

Unfortunately, I feel it's not "gone wrong" but "gone away". The prevailing attitude among my students (especially coming in) is that it doesn't matter, 'cause spell check fixes everything. So none of them even try to remember.

What I have found particularly horrifying in papers all through this year is the substitution of "thrown" for "throne". As in, "Hamlet reflects the uncertainty about the succession to the thrown." Or "The Victorian era is named after Queen Victoria, who sat on the thrown throughout this period."

These give a whole new perspective to the old "I trust him about as far as I can throw him", but are not words I'd have expected 'easily confused'.

Posted May 1, 2006 1:51 PM by Pedantic Peasant

I'll just add my two sense worth.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:03 PM by Lloyd Burchill

Frequent reader, new poster here... and I can't quite belive I'm piping up to disagree with JMD and other honored regulars here, but I just don't see how these can be spellcheck mistakes. If you choose the wrong homonym, it's still a valid word... thrown/throne, shuttered/shuddered, etc. The ony way the spellchecker can be blamed is if the author had a near-miss typo for the wrong word in the first place. (The one exception is prostate/prostrate; the former is mysteriously absent from most software dictionaries.)

It's neat for me to see you professional writerly-type-people enjoying these eggcorns (and thanks! I hadn't known of that site either), because from my POV as a complete amateur, they're really wince-worthy. I read a lot of fanfiction (hey, it's free) and homonym abuse is everywhere, even in stories that are otherwise pretty good. I've tried puzzling out the reason, but I think Theresa has the likeliest idea... those of us who grew up with arual saturation from TV/radio just remember sounds with more clarity than words. I know I find that snippets of songs can bring up memories just as powerfully as certain smells.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:15 PM by Charity

'Eggcorns' is a new one on me.

Aren't these also malapropisms?

Posted May 1, 2006 2:18 PM by L. Pullers

I see these while proofreading all the time. My favorite so far is "Earth fell under the alien yolk" -- well, no, not unless the aliens are birds, as I wrote in the margin. Second favorite -- "He had the patients of an angle" -- though this had to be the result of too much reliance on spellcheckers.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:19 PM by Lisa Goldstein

And what's with "because" spelled "becuase"? I've even encountered in professional publications! Why doesn't spell check pick up that one? Or does it and people override it?
(yes, pet peeve; for some reason it grates on my nerves!)

Posted May 1, 2006 2:22 PM by Emma

Spellcheck only knows if it's a real word. It can't tell which one was intended if there are multiple possibilities. If the user doesn't know which one is correct, they'll probably pick the first one (or the one they think is right), even if it turns out later to be wrong.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:28 PM by P J Evans

I still find myself typing speak my peace, despite having been corrected many times now that it's piece.

Well, this gets into another kind of confusion with English usage, but could that be influenced by the fact that you "hold your peace" when you've decided not to "speak your piece"?

Posted May 1, 2006 2:31 PM by cmk

The "reign" for "rein" one drives me up a tree.

Another one I see all the time that makes me want to kill things is "diety". As in, "Artemis is the diety of the hunt."

THAT'S NOT EVEN A WORD, GENIUS. *sporksporkspork*

Posted May 1, 2006 2:31 PM by Leigh Butler

First off, I love Making Light. Thank you!

This is from the U.K. Guardian paper this morning:

Imagine how many more copies Jane Eyre might have sold in its first run if Brontë's publishers had run a campaign featuring a smouldering Jane and Rochester and a burning Thornfield.

The Guardian, Monday 1st May

It's not really a dreadful phrase (homonym/spellcheck mistake) like the others posted, but I really liked the idea of Thornfield actually setting Jane and Rochester on fire.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:35 PM by Nikki

One from spoken Engish that drives me up the wall is "the point is mute"; the CEO of a company I used to work for said that regularly. I don't think I've ever seen it in print, though.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:37 PM by Mike Jones

I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the ever-popular 'to wreck havok'.

Incidently, I blame this on people hearing the phrase, but not reading it often enough to get the correct spelling implanted in their memory. So, when they pop up with it, they pick the spelling they think is most right.

And ditto for the reign/rein transpositions. I still boggle whenever I see a phrase like 'He took the reigns of the situation'.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:38 PM by Renee

From the would-be administrative assistant who claimed to be a "rabid typist" to the executive who boasted that he was "instrumental in ruining the entire operation," misspellings communicate that you have poor writing skills or a lackadaisical attitude.

So write.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:39 PM by Harry Connolly

Harry -- yes, I remember a librarian who applied for a job with a line on his resume about his Lexus/Nexus skills. But he got the job anyway, which still rankles me.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:46 PM by Janet Croft

Oh, and here's a new one I got in an email today -- from a grad student, no less:

"I'll try an see if I can start later. Would that be exceptable or not?"

And this is someone we are allowing to work as a teaching assistant? The mind reals!

Posted May 1, 2006 2:49 PM by Janet Croft

I'm a Sims 2 Addict (not in recovery). Today I came on custom skin called a Flamingo Dress. As, it is further explained, worn by a Flamingo dancer.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:55 PM by Linda Fox

And a couple more...

'What the hay' and 'to hit the hey'.

Okay, they're colloquial, but still.

Posted May 1, 2006 2:55 PM by Renee

Amusingly enough, "flamingo" and "flamenco" derive from the same source: the dazzling outfits worn by Flemish soldiers in Spain's armies.

Posted May 1, 2006 3:00 PM by theophylact

Yeah, but they're completely different English words. The same can be said of 'rape' and 'rapture'—both come from a root meaning 'carry off'. I maintain, however, that I'm quite willing to drive a man to rapture, but not to rape!

Posted May 1, 2006 3:06 PM by Xopher

Janet, apologies for my profession. Lexus-Nexus???? I presume some sort of law librarian?aaaieeeee!
And how about "broach" and "brooch"? I once had the un-luck to come across "he brooched the subject gingerly." AND "she wore his broach proudly." I know in technical terms "broach" is considered a variation of "brooch" but, since I had always encountered either as the verb or with the meaning "chisel" it gave me a bad feeling about her dress sense!

Posted May 1, 2006 3:14 PM by Emma

Spelling peeves: I've noticed that all too often, "yay" is used where "yea" ought to be. And speaking of not even being a word, "sike!" seems to be the common spelling of "psych!".

I was going to post about eggcorns, but I see that several zillion already have. So instead, I will point to the book of the Anguish Languish

Posted May 1, 2006 3:17 PM by Owlmirror

I'm guilty of more of these than I'm willing to admit. Just last week, I was caught with "peak their interest." To say that I'm embarrassed by my spelling is an understatement. I keep a dictionary around and check it often. (I’m a big fan of dictionary.com.) In spite of that precaution, too many mistakes slip through.

I could blame a number of different bad influences, but I’ll just say it’s my fault now. I need to take responsibility and work to improve my writing.

This post is a good example of why I read this blog. I don’t feel as though I’m smart enough or experienced enough to be posting here, but I know that if I hang around I will learn something and, I hope, improve myself.

Posted May 1, 2006 3:20 PM by Joe J

Teresa: This brings back those halcyon days (which I'm tempted to call Halcion days) when mystery novelist Nancy Atherton used to freelance for us and I'd get a call from the receptionist: "I have Nancy African on the line."

L. Pullers: Now that's a malapropism; some eggcorns would qualify, some would not. A lot are just mistakes involving homonyms. A malapropism involves a words that is similar in sound, but different, like "professional" and 'professorial."

Of course I see this sort of thing all day long, but I can't recall a lot of good ones right this minute. There are a bunch of homonyms such as leach/leech and sheer/shear that even good writers have trouble with.

Oh yeah--I do see:

He poured over the textbooks for hours.

all the time.

Posted May 1, 2006 3:21 PM by Robert L

One of the most frequent mistakes: "just desserts".

Posted May 1, 2006 3:21 PM by Scraps

From an short story read online:

"He put her hands around her waste."

Um, eww?

Posted May 1, 2006 3:22 PM by Mrs. TD

While marking this week's crop of exams I discovered that one student had written about World War One vets suffering from Post-Dramatic Stress Disorder.

A TA for a history course on Western Civilization found an even better one: "The medieval system of government was considered pointless and ineffective. That is why it was called futilism."

Posted May 1, 2006 3:29 PM by Ariella

As I become tired, I become dangerously prone to homonym typos, and even more embarrassingly, near-but-not-quite homonyms. Such as transposing "are" for "hour" and other similar abuses. It is as though my hands are taking dictation from my brain, but after a certain point they cease paying attention to the context of what is being written, and instead type out rough approximations of what they think they heard my brain say. It is very odd - my brain very clearly knows which word I intend to use, but something gets very broken in the process of nervous system transliteration. I have to stop and look at my hands as though they are completely mad. I occasionally fear am suffering from some kind of a Strangelovian disorder and my hands are going to one day run away with my text altogether.

Posted May 1, 2006 3:33 PM by Graham Blake

Emma-- Nope, just a garden-variety librarian. The other members of the search committee somehow didn't think it was too alarming that a librarian couldn't spell the name of a database he said he'd learned to use. Personally, I hold members of my notoriously nit-picky profession to pretty high standards and feel they have even less excuse than other people for typos on their resumes. And catalogers even more so!

Posted May 1, 2006 3:35 PM by Janet Croft

I've heard somewhere - and I can't believe I don't have a link for it, but I'm firing up Google and trying to find the right search terms - that memory as it relates to spelling is more linked to sound than to sight. So I would say these have less to do with spellcheckers and more to do with hazy recall.

Posted May 1, 2006 3:49 PM by Relly

Here's a pet peeve I've nursed for years. In the 70s/80s CBC radio news announcers started pronouncing "junta" with a j as in James. I complained. They explained to me that this was a new corporate policy as Canadians weren't familiar with Spanish pronunciation and to say it correctly would be much too confusing for us to cope with.

I suppose it prevented spelling mistakes, but I still twitch when I think about it.

Posted May 1, 2006 3:50 PM by enjay

"I have Nancy African on the line."

Coulda been the spider calling.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:04 PM by Kayjay

This discussion *almost* makes me miss teaching undergraduates, from whom I received the following in essays:
misquote spray
broad soldiers
peachy king

The one mistake which most rankles me is defiantly/definitely. I would issue a blanket condemnation of the use of "definitely" as a wek intensifier at the start of every semester -- it never seemed to help.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:08 PM by Ann Rose

enjay: As someone who speaks Spanish well, I'm not fond of that pronunciation either, but it is acceptable per Web. 11. I console myself with the thought that it did inspire the great song by the Monochrome Set, "The Jet-Set Junta."

Posted May 1, 2006 4:10 PM by Robert L

I guess if these things are set to music, they become mondegreens.

I don't find myself accidentally typing homynyms, and I avoid spell checkers. But I do have one personal howler to relate.

It doesn't make any difference in spelling, but I took it for granted that the expression "the die is cast" referred to the process of making a mold.

In the Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce wrote that the die is not cast, it is cut. For some reason missing the context of "dice", I emphatically agreed. After all, a die is USED to cast, so I assumed the original expression about casting the die had been garbled somehow.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:13 PM by Larry Kestenbaum

These things don't phase me at all -- I would of spelled them correctly, had I known.

:: aaarghghghhhahhh ::

Another thing that is disappearing fast is correctly formulating conditional tense -- if it were [to be].

Where I work, we are dealing with 'outsourced' copyediting, and whether it is an autochanger or a person, correct usage -- 'if it were [to be] found that ...' -- is invariably replaced with 'if it was found ...'.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:13 PM by murgatroyd

A book crossed my disk recently wherein the author had persistently referenced the breaks on the protagonist's car. This would have been less annoying if the CE had actually corrected it.

I once was the third person in an email chain where the first person spelled it "chord" and the second person spelled it "cored." Unfortunately, the word they wanted was "cord."

"passed history not with standing"--perhaps he just got a C-minus?

Posted May 1, 2006 4:13 PM by --E

A shutter went through my uncle's body once, but those are the hazards of tornado country.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:14 PM by Mike

Oh yes: At least one of these has more or less entered the language now: "butt naked."

Posted May 1, 2006 4:25 PM by Robert L

Is there any psych research that could shed some light on Teresa's observation: "I can only hypothesize that their ears remember better than their eyes do"?

Because I just can't imagine making any of these mistakes. It's impossible - reading them makes my eyes hurt. Maybe that's just a matter of practice, for I've been a fanatical reader for many years. But I also wonder if it's because I don't hear words as I read them. They feel like abstract shapes to me. (I believe, from the sort of verbal slips I make, that words are filed in my head by approximate length, and by first letter - like a Scrabble dictionary. Unfortunately, even if this is true, it doesn't make me good at Scrabble, because I can't anagram worth a damn.)

If I want to hear words as I read them, I have to consciously turn the sound up in my mind. I used to avoid doing this, because the sound in my head slows me down. At some point I figured out that good writing gets a lot better if you listen to it in your head instead of just reading it, so now I read novels a bit more slowly - but with a lot more enjoyment.

I've also had to practice listening to my own writing as I type - that's a learned skill for me.

Does everyone read this way, or just some of us?

Posted May 1, 2006 4:33 PM by Mike B

Oh, man. I really want some misquote spray.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:34 PM by elise

From what I have seen of manuscripts in the past few years, one of the primary jobs of a proofreader is to wipe out the symptoms of what I call Homonym Disease.

So many writers choose the wrong read/red where/wear the other belongs. No doubt you have seen this epidemic yourself. It's one that spell checkers can't prevent.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:36 PM by Scorpio

Mike B: You may be treating written English as a heiroglyphic system (you remember the shapes of words, rather than merely their phonetic components). There is research to support this; it is one way of treating the most common form of dyslexia.

I do this myself. The wrong word is a physical wrench to the reading process. Certain common mistakes (teh for the, for instance) I've learned to gloss over, but most still make me wince.

I also tend to typo real words--thing for thin, for instance, or this for thin. Bah, humbug.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:42 PM by Renee

cmk:

I think the tendency to type 'speak my peace' is possibly influenced by the confluence of 'peace of mind' and 'give you a piece of my mind'. I've taken to using 'speak my peace' as a type of written pun that, if spoken, simply wouldn't register.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:42 PM by ksgreer

We watched shutter spread memetically through one fandom's fanfic, and then out into others. At one point it seemd like every second sex scene had someone shuttering. It was often associated with taught muscles.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:43 PM by Aquila

I also like "writhing under his administrations".

You are nearly responsible for my wife choking to death, luckily jello isn't too good at blocking the airway. I suppose I have to share some of the blame for my part in relaying the bellowing cloaks line.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:44 PM by Myles Corcoran

When I was a grader/TA/instructor, I counted off on papers if it was obvious that the student had not used a spell-checker. I also counted off when it was all too clear that the student had trusted the spell-checker implicitly.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:46 PM by joann

murgatroyd: Worse, I've seen people actually correct "faze" to "phase" as in your first sentence.

On a local news broadcast, I once saw a graphic listing charges that had been brought against someone, including "wreckless driving".

Posted May 1, 2006 4:52 PM by Jen Roth

spoken malapropisms are different, of course, but those are the ones that seem to grate on me worst.

i had a teacher in high school who always said "serendipitous" when he meant "surreptitious". & he said it more than you might imagine, too.

i was listening to a radio program about the state of mental health care in the us yesterday, & it would have been a very interesting program, except the speaker kept saying "intimate danger" when he meant "imminent danger." aaaargh. & this was a former writer for the new york times.

Posted May 1, 2006 4:59 PM by miriam beetle

I learned from a non-Wiki reference source that Reggie White reeked havoc on the field.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:00 PM by Arthur D. Hlavaty

During my university years, one prof specifically advised against trusting spellcheckers--he'd found a study where one group of students was given a page of text with twenty spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes and told to correct it, while another group was given the same page and allowed to use spellcheck to correct it.

The spellchecked version had half again as many mistakes in the final count, including some that were not in the original piece.

If I weren't at work, I'd google-fu a reference for this.

(guiltily ducks back under her rock)

Posted May 1, 2006 5:01 PM by Renee

No-one seems to have mentioned one of the ones that really annoys me. Somehow, in recent years, the practice has crept in of saying (and writing) e.g. "If I would have known that, I wouldn't have bought the squid." Isn't the correct form "If I had known that..."?

It is actually all too easy in a long spell-checking job to hit the wrong option and authorise a misspelling. I've done it, and I'm about the most pedantic speller I know, though less so about other solecisms.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:03 PM by Zander

Because I just can't imagine making any of these mistakes. It's impossible - reading them makes my eyes hurt. Maybe that's just a matter of practice, for I've been a fanatical reader for many years. But I also wonder if it's because I don't hear words as I read them.

I always hear words when I read them, but I'm still stunned by spelling mistakes like these. I think there must be an additional component in the filing system, though, because "rein" and "reign" definitely (indeed, defiantly) occupy different parts of my brain. I tend to think it is more of a meaning thing than a visual thing, because I don't think of myself as a visual person at all. That said, I always have trouble pronouncing a name or a new, complex word until I know how it is spelled; after that, I generally have little trouble. Beats me, then.

As for student essays, most of the ones I've kept have contained sentences amusing mostly for their bathos. But there were a few of these things too:

“[Caesar’s] invasion of England was looked upon in awe as it was the first Roman sea exhibition outside the Mediterranean…”

"Cleopatra ... memorised the Roman men."

"Both [Pompey and Crassus] sited their views in public..." and (from a different essay) "were dually elected".

And my favourite student citation, of Suetonius' Life of the Defiled Julius.

Those are all from the same set of exams last year.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:04 PM by candle

Relly, some people spell visually, and others spell aurally. You can tell which way they spell by watching how their eyes move when they try to spell a difficult word.

People who spell visually are generally better spellers than people who spell aurally. "Sound it out," which is how I was taught spelling in grade school, is terrible advice for anyone who is trying to learn to spell English! Only when I discarded it did I become a good reader; and a good reader is (barring neurological problems I don't know about) a good speller.

The more times you see a word spelled correctly, and see the correct choice made between homophones, the more likely you are to get it right when you write...so I'd say "read, and having read, write right, and your paper will be read, but less red."

BTW I think children (as opposed to adolescents or young adults) should not be taught the word 'homonym' at all. Appallingly, it's used for both homophones AND homographs, which are entirely different things. This makes it virtually impossible to explain the situation of 'red', which is homophonous with 'read' (past), which is homographic with 'read' (present), which is homophonous with 'reed'.

Not that I believe in using 'homophone' and 'homograph' in grade or junior high school either. If your goal is to teach them Greek, sure. If your goal is to improve their spelling by getting a concept across, no. Call them 'sound-alike words' and 'look-alike words'.

Doesn't anyone have any damn SENSE any more?!?!?!

OK, end rant. This has driven me crazy for decades.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:10 PM by Xopher

I'm surprised that many of these things *aren't* caught by software. Or, rather, that Google hasn't already invented the software that would catch them.

For instance: I doubt that the word "shuttering" occurs very often in the wild. If it turns up in a paragraph it's probably a typo. Or consider "excepted his application": surely it wouldn't take a very sophisticated computer program to know that "accepted" and "excepted" are phonetic cousins, and that "accepted his application" is a common phrase while "excepted his application" is rare.

Of course, once Google gets bored making real money and decides to invent this software, a lot of pro writers will probably turn it off, lest it surround every novel turn of phrase with a swarm of dialog boxes. Terry Pratchett wouldn't be able to see his own prose for all the underlining.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:12 PM by Mike B

On the unintentional pun front, the next site I visited after Making Light just now had this in a record review:

the two sides often stay as distant as rival cliques at the high school reunion. Without a guiding principal, the dud tracks sound even weaker

I'm pretty sure that was unintentional, anyway.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:12 PM by candle

On a local news broadcast, I once saw a graphic listing charges that had been brought against someone, including "wreckless driving".

I'd define 'wreckless driving' as 'driving without ever totalling a car'.

"Cleopatra ... memorised the Roman men."

Well...I'm sure she tried.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:15 PM by Xopher

You may be treating written English as a heiroglyphic [sic*] system (you remember the shapes of words, rather than merely their phonetic components). There is research to support this; it is one way of treating the most common form of dyslexia.

Which is interesting, because within living memory that is how reading was taught in a great many American elementary schools -- the infamous "look-say" system, which was later denounced as the primary source of American illiteracy, phonics being touted as the Only True Way to do it. (The issue is anything but simple, and as you'd expect with something involving public ed, has political components, and I'm not trying to start a fight about it.)

Most of the examples I remember have already been cited, though not "comprise" for "compose." I would put "comprised of" in the same category as "I'm nauseous;" it's not usually an issue of the person mistaking one word for another ("compose" and "nauseated" are not particularly esoteric words) but of someone who assumes they are synonyms and is trying to sound elevated.

An invented one does come to mind,** though it's more of an in-joke, as I can't imagine the people who would use the phrase making this error:

"Speech is privilege."

You know, there's at least one F/SF story in that.

*Speaking of popular typos. . . .
**Come on, you knew I would do this.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:27 PM by John M. Ford

I only have one, but it's a doozy:

"He gave her organism after organism."

To which I can only say that they should have been using protection.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:32 PM by galley slave

One that threw me completely out of a story a while back: "Why are you her?"

After a moment I realized that, rather than suggesting one person turning into another, or in disguise, it was supposed to be "Why are you here?" But by then it was too late.

(I am also very tired of muscles being described as "taught"; even if spelled correctly, that's a cliche.)

Posted May 1, 2006 5:37 PM by Vicki

I'm with Xopher on "wreckless driving." How can one not be for it?

Posted May 1, 2006 5:37 PM by Linkmeister

I'm an auditory reader, and I make these kinds of mistakes because I spell by sound. A lot of them look like the sort of mistakes speech recognition software makes, too.

Re: when the "mistake" sounds more accurate than the real term-someone close to me says "stay within earshout."

Makes sense to me, since we don't have to fire a rifle 'cross the holler to get in touch with our neighbors.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:46 PM by Melissa Mead

i am a visual speller, i always have been. i have a primarily visual mind, perhaps linked to the fact that i am a visual artist.

so i've always been a very good speller. if i've seen a word a couple of times, i can usually spell it. i thought it was a silly skill to have past elementary school, what with spellcheckers.... but it does make one feel smart on the internet.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:49 PM by miriam beetle

That said, I always have trouble pronouncing a name or a new, complex word until I know how it is spelled; after that, I generally have little trouble.

I can remember words once I've seen them written down, but I can't remember spoken words well. I have a friend who collects folk ballads, and she can learn lyrics by ear, which to me is an inexplicable magical skill. I can pick up tunes by ear, to some extent, but the words fall right out of my head. I have better luck if I translate the spoken words into typewritten text on an imaginary piece of paper in my head - but that's so slow and mentally taxing that I usually prefer just to forget.

A side effect of remembering words as they appear on a page: when I read a book, and then read a different edition of the same book, I am occasionally distracted because the line breaks have moved and now the book is different.

John Ford: I was taught phonics in first grade. Fortunately, although phonics seems to have made no impression on me whatsoever, my growth does not appear to have been stunted!

Posted May 1, 2006 5:49 PM by Mike B

Galley Slave: *doubles over in hysterical laughter*

Janet: a CATALOGER made that mistake? And they hired him? Ouch.

Mike and John: it's nice to know that there's something real about visual language skills. I learned to read when very young and can, by now, manage several languages well and others not-so-well. I've noticed that even at the early learning stages, I visualize the words and will pick up on those that look "wrong". I've had teachers insist I couldn't possibly know from the shape of the word alone, but I do!

It's a problem when I am dealing with Romance languages, where there are close-enough words, and I have to remind myself which language I am using.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:50 PM by Emma

I make the distinctions between comprise/compose and nauseated/nauseous that Mike does, but mostly for pleasure in making the distinctions (and desire to not appear illiterate to pedants); Web 11 disputes the correctness of both distinctions.

Posted May 1, 2006 5:51 PM by Scraps

Writerious,

A while back a friend of mine did some etymological research on the nauseated/nauseous thing and tells me that the two have swapped meaning several times over the years.

Posted May 1, 2006 6:03 PM by Max

Enormity/enormousness is another one. And fortuitous/fortunate.

Posted May 1, 2006 6:07 PM by Scraps

Mike B: "accepted his application" is a common phrase while "excepted his application" is rare

OTOH, applications and exceptions go hand in glove in my world - software.

Posted May 1, 2006 6:15 PM by protected static

Another thing that is disappearing fast is correctly formulating conditional tense -- if it were [to be].

Where I work, we are dealing with 'outsourced' copyediting, and whether it is an autochanger or a person, correct usage -- 'if it were [to be] found that ...' -- is invariably replaced with 'if it was found ...'.

if clauses—the traditional rules. According to traditional rules, you use the subjunctive to describe an occurrence that you have presupposed to be contrary to fact: if I were ten years younger, if America were still a British Colony. The verb in the main clause of these sentences must then contain the verb would or (less frequently) should: If I were ten years younger, I would consider entering the marathon. If America were still a British colony, we would all be drinking tea in the afternoon. When the situation described by the if clause is not presupposed to be false, however, that clause must contain an indicative verb. The form of verb in the main clause will depend on your intended meaning: If Hamlet was really written by Marlowe, as many have argued, then we have underestimated Marlowe’s genius. If Kevin was out all day, then it makes sense that he couldn’t answer the phone.

Remember, just because the modal verb would appears in the main clause, this doesn’t mean that the verb in the if clause must be in the subjunctive if the content of that clause is not presupposed to be false: If I was (not were) to accept their offer—which I’m still considering—I would have to start the new job on May 2. He would always call her from the office if he was (not were) going to be late for dinner.

Posted May 1, 2006 6:20 PM by Scraps

murgatroyd opined:

Another thing that is disappearing fast is correctly formulating conditional tense -- if it were [to be]

English is losing syntax more basic than the conditional tense: Participles are vanishing. For instance: "carry handles", "shave cream", and "bake time". And, of course, "spell checkers".

Granted, English has a history of jettisoning the "complicated" parts, but it seems we're starting to lose some of the essential bits,

Posted May 1, 2006 6:24 PM by Glen Fisher

Granted, English has a history of jettisoning the "complicated" parts, but it seems we're starting to lose some of the essential bits,

N dbt vwls wll b nxt t g.

Posted May 1, 2006 6:28 PM by Owlmirror

I don't recall when "was graduated from" completely disappeared, but it was a good while ago.

Posted May 1, 2006 6:30 PM by John M. Ford

Owlmirror: Well, the shift toward text-messagese has already started.

73, JMF

Posted May 1, 2006 6:32 PM by John M. Ford

found a really good one

By way of TBogg, Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist wants to be the "marquis candidate" for the Constitution Party.

Unless Tancredo runs, of course.

Posted May 1, 2006 6:34 PM by julia

If we're getting into mangled spelling, a local chain of flower shops regularly advertises "bokays", at least on their store marquees.

Posted May 1, 2006 6:40 PM by Glen Fisher

Julia: If Gilchrist wants to be the 'marquis candidate' he may have to duke it out with Tancredo.

Posted May 1, 2006 6:48 PM by Fragano Ledgister

candle -- "Cleopatra ... memorised the Roman men."

The first semester I was a grader, one of the students wrote: "The head of Nefertiti has long been arousing to archaeologists and art historians." Fortunately this was not in the fall, when the first grading time tended to correspond all too closely with ArmadilloCon.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:11 PM by joann

I'm with those who boggle at these mistakes, because they always instantly jump out at me. I don't know if I'm a visual speller or not, because the same applies to grammatical errors; an incorrect subject/verb agreement or a misplaced comma bugs me just as much, which doesn't seem to lend itself to a "shape of the word" style recognition.

Then again, I learned how to read and write the same way I learned to play the piano, which is to say I cheated. I figured both things out not by studying the rules, but by imitating what I heard or read repeatedly until they were ingrained and unbreakable sets of pattern recognition. Or something.

So, in the same way I barely remember how to read music, but can still play Mozart from muscle memory, I remember virtually nothing about the rules of phonics and grammar (subjunctive mood? Mine eyes glazeth over), yet very rarely seem to make mistakes in sentence structure.

Other than the unfortunate propensity for run-on sentences, of course.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:12 PM by Leigh Butler

Scraps: Yay subjunctive! It's perfectly clear to anyone who grew up using it, and was taught to use it by people who did so correctly. My mother says that if you don't have the subjunctive by the time you're five, you'll never really have it.

Murgatroyd, if by "outsourced copyediting" you mean using freelancers rather than in-house employees, I've been one of those freelancers, I've hired more of them than I can count, and they can be extraordinarily good. If yours aren't good, get better ones. They're out there.

One of the things we never did was accept offers from "copyediting firms" who proposed to have their (nameless) copyeditors work on our manuscripts. That never works. Quality control goes all to hell. As Martha Schwartz said, "If they're good enough to work on our books, they're good enough to take our copyediting test and work for us directly." Also: "We don't use anonymous copyeditors."

On general spelling theory: your real killer-bee mutant spellers remember spellings visually, and double-check them kinesthetically. Unread misspellings in their peripheral vision generate a Sense of Wrongness. Some of them report perceiving typos as literally sticking up above the surface of the page, or flashing, or being a different color from the rest of the text. On occasion they can spot typos that are going past faster than anyone can read, when they don't perceive themselves as reading the passing text. Some can orally spell out words at auctioneer speed -- see Detective DeLongpre (played by Lyle Lovett) spelling "Gudmundsdottir" in The Player. I can do it for whole phrases. Orally spelling antidisestablishmentarianism isn't harder than spelling townsfolk. It just takes longer.

I don't know how that kind of spelling ability correlates with being able to pun and rhyme. If it does, I suspect it's an inverse correlation. It took half an hour for "misquote spray" to decode for me, and I'm still stymied by "speech is privilege."

The only use I have for phonetic spelling is as a mnemonic device, and then only in a few cases, such as fuchsia: it's rude, but it works.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:12 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Language is in a constant state of flux, so a lot of usages that were once considered incorrect are now so thoroughly accepted that few people even are aware they were once considered substandard. Somwhere I have a grammar book from the 1930s decrying the use of "fix" to mean "to repair." I can't think of anyone who wouldn't use that word in that way now.

"Nauseous" to mean "experiencing feelings of nausea" hasn't advanced quite that far, but I think it's almost there. When I was a boy I was taught to say "nauseated" instead of "nauseous," and to reserve the latter to mean "inspiring nausea" ("A nauseous odor issued from the slaughterhouse.") Now, I know more than one person who says, "It made me nauseous," and I often don't bother to correct such usage when I'm editing fiction (depends on context).

Somehow in all this talk of eggcorns and malapropisms, I am also reminded of the list that Ellie Lang used to have of titles of books that customers had requested at some bookstore or other. I've forgotten a lot of them, but the two that stood out were those great classics of African American literature, Color Me Purple and The Autobiography of Malcolm the Tenth.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:14 PM by Robert L

Robert: I remember Clan of the Care Bears and Women Who Love Men Who Hate Women Who Deserve It.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:17 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

They're all of the "a moment's thought" variety (as in "a moment's thought would indicate that's wrong). Those are the mistakes which people really shouldn't make.

But I have to disagree slightly with Teresa - how common they are in spoken English depends who you're speaking with, I think. There aren't any on that list which I'd be particularly surprised to have come up in conversation with friends, in one way or another.

(But then, we have some strange conversations at times.)

Posted May 1, 2006 7:26 PM by Paul

learn something every day... I thought the proper term was "baited breath" (Oh, come on, like you always knew what all the proper phrases were...) and come to find out here that it's "bated breath" and "bate" is a contraction for "abated" and that the only place the contraction is used is in the phrase "bated breath".

I still can't get what "misquote spray" is supposed to be...

Posted May 1, 2006 7:30 PM by Greg London

And then there's the ever-popular "hypocracy", evidently a form of government in which the populace are ruled by the lowest dregs of society. (Actually....)

Posted May 1, 2006 7:30 PM by Julie L.

Nobody's mentioned "poured over," but I ghost-wrote a "forward" to a book, so it's always something.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:31 PM by Jack Ruttan

years ago, in a student's paper: an off-hand mention of the human gnome project...

Posted May 1, 2006 7:34 PM by ley

Someone needs to sponsor a contest for a short story under 300 words with the most eggcorns possible that still manages to tell a story.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:35 PM by Dave Kuzminski

[blushing] offhand, that is.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:36 PM by ley

Mike B: you are not the only one to have to consciously turn up the sound in your head if you want to hear the text you're reading. This has been my lot for most of my life. Which is odd, because as far as anyone can guess, I learned to read from the phonics taught on "Sesame Street." Nobody's actually sure, since I was two or perhaps a little younger when I insisted that I didn't have to get down off the hood of my aunt's car because I was reading the inspection sticker, and, when challenged on this, rattled off "State of New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles."

The only times when I hear the words in my head rather than assimilating them soundlessly are when there's a strong regional idiom. I always heard the British accents in Douglas Adams.

Did this quirk give you the same trouble reading aloud as I had? I could never make my voice go as fast as the words were coming into my head.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:38 PM by Rikibeth

"Misquote spray": I'm guessing that it's to kill those flying insects that suck blood and spread malaria: mis-quo-tes.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:43 PM by Glen Fisher

Ad homonym is the logical fallacy you get when you deride someone by punning on their name.

And a tenement of faith is an argument based on faulty premises.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:45 PM by Kip W

Oh, crap. Mosquito spray.
I kept parsing variations of "misquoting" someone and assumed "spray" was wrong. wow.
this is definitely not my thing.

Posted May 1, 2006 7:47 PM by Greg London

My favourite, back when I was a fledging teaching assistant, informed me that 'The Chilean Christian Democratic Party was originally called the Fraganistas.' I resisted, barely, the urge to write 'They have betrayed everything for which I ever stood.'

Posted May 1, 2006 8:00 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Some of those mistakes make very vivid images of a The Phantom Tollbooth variety. Except, instead of just playing with idiom, it's playing with butchered idiom. Sometimes Terry Pratchett goes for things like this, but he's also a (criminal) genius, so maybe that sort of work should be left in his culpable hands.

The Bellowing Cloak.
Yolk of Alien rulership.
Baited breath.
The pre-imminent experts.

Of course, "a doggy-dog world" is not a word selection mistake, it's a spelling mistake. "A Doggy-dogg world" was generated by rapper Snoop Doggy-dogg, intentionally.

Posted May 1, 2006 8:00 PM by Scott

TexAnne writes:
"Wallah!" in tones of triumph. Or "Viola," ditto. This led to my current favorite, "VYE-OH-LAH!" But she'd just finished her first sock, so I forgave her.

Long ago, in a Christmas card, someone wrote my parents in those tones of triumph, exclaiming "Viola! (as we say in Peoria.)" This amused my father inordinately.

Ever afterward, when a Higgins triumphed, or when a string quartet was spotted, the cry was heard.

"Viola (as we say in Peoria)!"

Posted May 1, 2006 8:08 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

Today (or yesterday in fact) there was an article on this very subject in the Guardian:

If you believe the internet is the fount of all wisdom, giving free rein to bloggers to exercise their vocal cords, think again. Ancient English cliches and expressions are being mangled by the culture of cut and paste and the spread of unchecked writing on the internet.

According to the Oxford English Corpus, a database of a billion words, dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English.

"Straight-laced" is used 66% of the time even though it should be written "strait-laced", according to lexicographers working for Oxford Dictionaries, who record the way English is spoken and written by monitoring books, television, radio and newspapers and, increasingly, websites and blogs.

"Just desserts" is used 58% of the time instead of the correct spelling, "just deserts" (desert is a variation of deserve), while 59% of all written examples of the phrase in the Corpus call it a "font of knowledge or wisdom" when it should be "fount".

It has become so widely used that the wrong version is now included in Oxford dictionaries alongside the right one.

Posted May 1, 2006 8:13 PM by Gag Halfrunt

"Just desserts" is used 58% of the time instead of the correct spelling, "just deserts" (desert is a variation of deserve), while 59% of all written examples of the phrase in the Corpus call it a "font of knowledge or wisdom" when it should be "fount".

Interestingly, both of these mistakes don't bother me the way a lot of the other ones do, because the words themselves still imply a meaningful symbol or metaphor, even if they're more... bizarre than their original forms. (Once upon time, religion and wisdom were nearby on semantic webs, and you don't get dessert until you've earned it.) Also, I didn't even know "Just deserts," which just goes to show you that the internet is a fount of information.

Similarly, "toe the line" v. "tow the line" both mean something even if they mean different things.

Posted May 1, 2006 8:33 PM by Scott

I thought 'Ad homonym' was the name for attacking tagging for having lexical ambiguity, when opposed to controlled vocabulary keyword assignment. Flickr disambiguates by co-occurrence of other words which is fun.

On the 'look-say' vs 'phonics' battle, both are wrong, in that they are based on flawed cognitive theory.
Look-say falsely applies an analogy to how oral language acquisition works, and on how mature readers see words as a whole, effectively requiring beginning readers to re-derive all orthography themselves.
Phonics teaches post-hoc spelling 'rules' as predicates, which is equally inappropriate for children, as resolving predicate logic is hard enough in math, let alone when misapplied to spelling.

What works is teaching phonological awareness - that sounds are primary, and letters are representations of them, and that there are multiple 'sound pictures' for each phoneme in english. Then resolving homophones can be done by memory.
As this fits well with how the brain represents language, it can be taught relatively rapidly (Rosie, my wife, gets children from stumbling incoherence to