Defuse: not quite an eggcorn?

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Mon Dec 29 22:54:25 UTC 2008


In the print edition of the NYTimes today, in her book review Janet
Maslin, or her word processor, wrote "Dramatically, 'Bone by Bone' is
defuse; it would have benefited from a Mallory surrogate."  (Mallory
is described by Maslin as the author's "female Dirty Harry of
detective fiction.")

This appears as "diffuse" in the on-line version.  My version of MS
Word suggests "defuse" as the second correction to "difuse" -- but it
suggests "diffuse" as the first.

Joel

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