Grammar Sticklers
Grammar Stickler hobbled in for the weekend. She raised her cane at some posts she spotted, decrying the decline in writers' integrity. She threatened to name names by turning in the offenders to Eggcorns, but backed off when offered space here to get the rant out of her system:
I'd like my writing to be better known than my pension for booze.Grammar says if anyone should get a booze pension, it is she. She deserves it for having to read such tripe. Worse yet is this self-proclaimed "pro writer" excuse for the faux pas of using "clique" when she meant "cliche":
Typo late at night, probably caused by being on deadline with five books simultaneously and not sleeping so they all stay on schedule.
posted by Georganna Hancock M.S. | 7:27 AM
1 Comments:
I find that I sometimes type homonyms of the word I want, not because I don't know the difference but because my brain apparently encodes words primarily by sound. I usually catch them immediately after typing them, but not always. (I seldom do this with your/you're or there/their/they're, because they're so annoying.)
Similarly, I've noticed that there are sequences of letters that one gets used to typing. Back in high school, I had endless trouble typing the name Ellison (as in Harlan). My brain and my fingers insisted that the word should end in -sion, even though I knew perfectly well that Harlan's surname was not "Ellision."
So in the case or your cliche vs. clique example, the writer may have legitimately committed a typo, based on either a vision-based coding error or a pechant for typing words with -que in them.
The other person, of course, has only (mis)heard the word penchant, not read it. The web abounds with this sort of malapropism.
Karen
(mavarin @ aol.com)
http://journals.aol.com/mavarin/MusingsfromMavarin/
http://mavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.livejournal.com/users/mavarin/
(can't get much less anonymous than that!)
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