themselfs / themselve

[Mark Mandel]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 7:34 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

>
> at first i thought it was just a typo.  but it's easy to google up
> more, many more, e.g.:
>

I don't follow the logic here. If one author uses an unusual form or
spelling consistently, it's certainly intentional; maybe an idiosyncrasy or
a variation, but certainly not a typo (slip between mind and pen/keyboard,
or perhaps more generally misspelling). But you seem to be saying that if we
find many independent occurrences of such a form, from many separate
authors, then it is not a typo, even if there's no evidence that any of them
use it consistently or even more than once. Do I read you right?

--
Mark Mandel

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