People mixing up "flaunt" and "flout" were bad enough.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

Now we also hear of biased writers "skewering", not "skewing" their work toward a particular position, and just today I heard that some Bank of America trust account customers sued the bank because they had "gorged" them (instead of gouging). And these examples come from professional journalists. Is there no end to this linguistic decay?

[AWB]

One that stick in my mind: my hometown paper once misspelled the word "cat" as "act". The computer spellchecker must've let it slide.

[Tabithina]

I really hate it when "heart-rendering" is used instead of "heart-rending".

[Jack Batty]

This is friggin' weird.

Last night we were playing this game that my friend bought at Starbucks called Cranium.
One of the categories in the game is Lexicon where you have to come up with the correct definition of a word, and I totally boofed on "flout", mixing it up with "flaunt" (yes, I felt like an idiot).
I rarely use either word, and the fact that it came up last night, and there is now a thread dedicated to these two words is completely freaking me out.


_{Tin-foil ... must find more tin-foil. My hat is obviously not working}

[dropzone]

"Foundering," as in filling with water and sinking fast, vs "floundering," which I suppose really means flopping around like a beached flatfish.

[Fear Itself]

How about "far from the maddening crowd"? ooooh, that makes me mad!

[tomndebb]

You don't understand, javaman, the customers are mad that the bank force-fed them each time they came into challenge their statements.

Tabithina, you've got to admit that something heart-rendering would be really painful.

[LazarusLong42]

Originally posted by tomndebb

Tabithina, you've got to admit that something heart-rendering would be really painful. [/b]

Depends on whether you mean "rendering" as in "frying," or "rendering" as in "creating a three-dimensional image on a computer."



LL

[teela brown]

I know that these have been covered before, but still . . .

Mixing up "affect" and "effect"
Using the nonexistent word "orientate"
Saying "should of" instead of "should have"
Pronouncing "realtor" or "realty" as: "re-la-tor" or "re-la-ty"
Pronouncing "nuclear" as "noo-kyoo-lur"

- and most irritating of all -

Saying "subliminable" instead of "subliminal"

[The Fear of Id]

flautas and flutists and fluters (today's NY Times crossword says people who decorate columns)

[honkytonkwillie]

Damping and dampening.

The first one is to attenuate the magnitude of something, like a vibration. And the second one is to make something wet.

[Punoqllads]

Originally posted by javaman
And these examples come from professional journalists.

Journalists shouldn't be expected to get every word right. They don't know everything.

That's the editor's job.

[matt_mcl]

Crispy. I hate that word.

CRISP!!!

[tomndebb]

LL42, I'm old. I always think of rendering in terms of the try works.

[iampunha]

My mother tells me a co-worker moved to have the word "pubic" stricken from the company spellcheck on the grounds that if you ever needed to use the word you'd spell it right, or you'd learn damn quickly. This because same co-worker forgot the l in public.