Just like “Oh Fay” (in English, at any rate).
Oh, really? What if you only had two tens? What if you had a twenty, but it was a few years old and wasn’t crisp? Would you have to launder, dry and iron it so it’d be crisp and you could have your little wager?
Damnit, woman, words mean something!
(Well, I enjoy my little jokes.)
ETA: Not a misspelling so much as an unnecessary made-up word: “crispy”. Some advertising agency schmuck took a good word, “crisp”, and added a y to make a new word that means the same thing as the original word. Never mind the idiocy of adding y to an adjective.
Hal-a-pen-yoes? Little extra emphasis on the initial aspirate?
I think it’s a combination of “mis-hearing becomes misspelling” plus the fact that sometimes the new form has its own logic and charm:
“I will never step foot in that place again.” (instead of ‘set foot’)
I never heard ‘step foot’ before, say, the last five years. I have come to like it and am beginning to use it, though I didn’t mis-hear, and try never to misspell or misspeak.
Maybe not frequent, but a spelling and pronunciation that I used to use and have altered since being corrected is habañero for habanero. There is no tilde in the spelling and, thus, no “ny” sound in the pronunciation.
What about “vasty?” You like that word. Schmuck.
Just because a suit made it up doesn’t mean it’s not a perfectly cromulent word. “Crispy” and “crisp” are two entirely different words that mean different things. You wouldn’t call a burger “crisp” and you wouldn’t call a dollar bill “crispy”.
I think it’s almost more interesting that we pronounce the “h” where it’s silent in Spanish. We have no problem lopping off word-initial h sounds in our own language – “Letsaff a look then, eh?”–but doing it to other languages’ words makes us nervous somehow.
Gandhi is as nearly correct as possible, since it reflects the fact that the “d” is aspirated (accompanied by a puff of air when pronounced). “Gandi”, if it exists in Hindi, would be considered by a native speaker to be a different word with a different meaning, as we would do with cat and cad. Similarly with “Ghandi”, if that exists in the language. To a Hindi speaker it would be a different word.
My boss spells it this way, too. Drives me nuts when the other people in the office transcribe it that way.
With fewer people learning Latin the following misspellings are understandable, but I still find them grating (and increasingly common IME):
ad nauseum for ad nauseam
non sequitor for non sequitur
The fact that people were making this mistake in 1921 doesn’t mean they should continue to do so.
The sad truth is Americans are very, very poor when it comes to spelling (and pronouncing) recent French additions to the language. Scroll up to the au jus discussion for more on that.
Actually, along the lines of “with au jus”, I nominate “the hoi polloi”. I know, there’s one you see every day, right? Just trust me, people- your “the” is redundant.
At 151 I get to finally see my favorite bit of pedantry. 
I don’t get to use it often as I am, sadly part of hoi polloi.
The fact that people have been saying it the same way since 1921 means it’s not a mistake.
“Recent French additions” are English, once English-speaking people start using them in English-language contexts. When you’re talking to the cashier at Quizno’s, “au jus” is no more French than “mayonnaise”, and if someone chided you for “mispronouncing” mayonnaise “like a typical American”, you’d tell them they were an asshole.
With all due respect, Opal (and I’ve been respecting you for many years), I believe I was positing the opposite of your assertion. I was saying, “Hey, give the gal/guy a break; s/he may not know the correct spelling, but we can understand what s/he was trying to say.”
English is full of homophones and homonyms, but most people can get the idea if they just consider the context. Usually spoken language helps in this context, even if it’s a written posting on a message board.
Being literal or figurative, and using idioms are a completely different set of issues that have nothing to do with the OP. “My face was turning blue,” is not a misspelling; it’s an idiom. So why do you bother to bring it in to this discussion? Your examples are all idioms: “'til I was blue in the face,” is not misspelled. So why do you even bring it up?
Opal, if you truly think I am one of the “most literal minded persons sic [you’ve] encountered,” I humbly suggest that you check some of my past posts. Granted, most of them have been feeble-minded; but they often stray away from the literal.
I can only assume that you’ve never been into any legal problems; those (lawyers) are the most literal people you’ll encounter.
I have no idea what your other posts are like. This is the first time I’ve seen your name. I still stand by my post.
I think we’re cross-talking here. I obviously don’t think that jjim is likely to become literally violent and smash the glass around the Constitution :rolleyes:. It was (an attempt at least at) a humorous way of making a point. The figurative (i.e., the opposite of literal) use of saying that someone’s misspelling makes him or her want to do violent things is not what I have a problem with (in fact, that part is what I liked). It’s the degree of sentiment behind those figurative phrases that I was commenting on.
You can say “It bothers me when someone writes ‘thru’” or you can say I want to pull out a shot gun and blow their head off when some writes ‘thru’.". Obviously it’s not for literary effect. It’s to show how strongly it bothers you. I was simply saying that such vehemence seemed rather extreme to me.
And, in fact, I was being figurative (NOT literal) by telling jjim to “take a Valium.” (Because IANAD–that’s another joke…you do get that one, don’t you?) There is a term for this in discourse studies, but I forget what it is. It’s when you maintain an atypical register or manner of discourse with someone–like playing along with someone after they make a pun, by making another pun in response.
Does that clarify things?
I think so. So you can sit down now…(Get it?)
While I agree with your point, that Google-hit-popularity is not the same as correctness, you chose a poor example. The hit-iest version above, “I could care less,” isn’t a bad usage; it’s an ironic usage, on a par with “we should all have it so hard.”
Your own Michael Quinion concurs:
Wrong spelling —> right spelling:
Seperate —> separate (I’ve seen this one in this very thread)
Lead (past tense of “to lead”) —> led (Baldwin already mentioned this)
Lightening —> lightning
Athelete —> athlete
Irridescent —> iridescent
Sacreligious —> sacrilegious
Mischievious —> mischievous (also “grievious —> grievous,” and many other words that should end in -ous that are becoming -ious)
Incorrect: Using the verb “contaminates” as a noun.
Correct: The word is “contaminants.”
e.g. The concentration of contaminants in the groundwater were below regulatory criteria.
I see “contaminates” used as a noun just about every day. The problem is that it is a word in its own right (a verb), so spell-checkers don’t flag it.
Also, “orientate” instead of “orient”. This battle has been going on for over 150 years, to the point that “orientate” has entered the language as an actual word. Nevertheless, it’s a much newer word than “orient,” evidently being coined as a back-formation from “orientation.” Personally, I just cringe when hear that a new employee is being “orientated.”
Dagnabbit, folks, the words “phenomena” and “criteria” are plural! If you only have one of them, it’s a phenomenon or a criterion.