SOTA alert

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> On Dec 29, 2008, at 12:54 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> >
> > from the paper of record (NYT today, C11)
> >
> > Book review by Janet Maslin of Carol O'Connell's _Bone by Bone_:
> >
> > Dramatically "Bone by Bone" is defuse...It has no real central
> > character.
> >
> > [Since I assume both words are in the relevant dictionary, there's no
> > Cupertino effect to blame]
>
> hmm.  the opposite substitution is already in the ecdb:
>
>   http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/33/diffuse/
>
> the Maslin example looks like an ordinary mis-spelling to me, but i
> could be wrong.

This was mentioned by NYT style guru Phil Corbett in his "After
Deadline" column today, along with other spellchecker-proof typos:

http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/the-age-of-schadenfreude/


--Ben Zimmer

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