today's best spelling correction

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 6/17/07, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: today's best spelling correction
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 8:15 AM -0700 6/17/07, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> >i-i-i!  New York Times Week in Review, 6/17/07, p. 2:
> >
> >CORRECTIONS
> >
> >A graphic  last Sunday about health and safety issues misspelled the
> >name of a new diagnosis for the shoulder pain caused by playing
> >tennis on Wii, the video game console.  It is acute Wiiitis, not Wiitis.
> >
> So the formerly robust *C[i]C[i]C[i] orthographic constraint barring
> three consecutive identical consonants (responsible for, inter alia,
> "wall-less" or "shell-like" as apposed to "windowless" or
> "shelflike", and for the haplology in "freest" and the hyphen in
> "twee-est") is no longer undominated.  Are there other violations out
> there that I've missed?

"Threers"?

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004614.html


--Ben Zimmer

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