today's best spelling correction

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 18, 2007, at 6:25 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:

> 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"?

barbara partee spelled it "threeers".

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

but how did barbara partee's father know that the word was spelled
"threeers" rather than "three-ers" (with hyphenation, as in "twee-
est") or "threers" (with orthographic haplology, as in "freest")?

arnold

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