Of course you didn’t find it. I’m not saying it is always obvious, but you have to look words up under the correct lemma, in your case, the verb “fix”.
It’s distinction is lost on me.
You’ll have to explain. Obviously only alternate can be a verb. As nouns, an alternate has a much narrower meaning - a person with a formal role as a particular kind of alternative. As adjectives, alternate can mean alternating back and forth (“on alternate days”), or it can be a synonym for alternative. Have I missed anything? What is it that you object to?
Yay.
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Nah, they’re really not – those are pretty typical mistakes, even for good students. If you want to see what some of the bad mistakes look like, there’s an entertaining thread of them here.
I blame greengrocer’s.
I was going to post something but now the point is mute.
So there’s some golden era during which some significant proportion of people cared more, basically? I don’t think so.
There’s a lovely woman in my office who is always talking about “notating the file” inside of just “noting the file”.
Heh. Some of y’all haven’t read Frindle when you were a kid and it shows.
Maybe she said ‘annotating’, and you misheard.
Mala-what ism??
Oh. You mean Melon Prompts, don’t you? Yeah. A lot of folks get that wrong. Don’t feel bad.
If you look up peruse, the definition is given as “read (something), typically in a thorough or careful way.”
And browse is “an act of casual looking or reading.”
To me those sound like antonyms, but multiple sources list them as synonyms.
That doesn’t jive with my thoughts on the matter but… oh well.
ETA: “Jibe/Jive” is cromu-lint because it pops up here on the SDMB so often.
Language errors may or may not affect comprehension a great deal, and if they don’t it’s only because context and the intrinsic structure of language provides redundancy. But it often does affect it. I don’t know how many times I’ve misread something the first time, or struggled to understand it, because of mistakes as simple as bad punctuation, and worse errors can make comprehensibility correspondingly worse. But even if comprehension isn’t affected, language errors come across as rude, lazy, uncaring, and ignorant, which is indeed annoying. Sometimes when confronted with their mistakes, the writers themselves claim they don’t care, so why should anyone else? But to me it’s like serving someone dinner in a slovenly heap on a dirty dinner plate unwashed from last night, with the excuse that it’s rare that such practice has ever actually prevented anyone from eating.
Exactly. Dave Barry blames the sign’s posted in grocery store’s and bar’s and the like for a novel form of punctuation that seems to have made it into the language, mostly involving spurious quotation mark’s and apostophe’s, like 'TRY “OUR” TASTY BURRITO’S". If you haven’t yet come across Dave Barry’s “Ask Mr Language Person” columns, Google “Ask Mr Language Person” and enjoy some samples! 
One reason I cannot stand Dan Brown’s novels is his fabrication of an academic field from whole cloth. His hero, the books assert, is a professor of “symbology,” which is not actually a thing that people study.
This wouldn’t irk me so except that semiotics is a thing that people study. I presume that Brown’s fabrication of “symbology”—in flagrant disregard for both reality and the field of semiotics—was an effort to make his main character more accessible and relatable.
I know people don’t want to look up the word “semiotics” as they inhale the first chapter of a Dan Brown book in all its pulpy glory. But he could easily explain it, even using the pseudo-word “symbology.” That would be accessible; no one would have to look up a thing. But: nah. Learning is hard, amirite?
I’m not fully serious, except that I’m deadly serious. 
“Noting the file” means “acknowledging or taking note of the file’s existence”.
“Annotating the file” means adding a note to the file.
The OED has “notate” as (among other things) a now-obsolete variant of “annotate”. So perhaps your colleague is just old-fashioned in her speech?
I was 28 years old when this Canadian book was published, so… you got me, I did not read this as a child. Well spotted.
Alternating is a thing. That is what the word “alternate” is for. Using it for another term that already has the almost exactly similar spelling is therefore foolish and unnecessary. Use the word “alternative” when you mean a second option, do not use the world “alternate”.
As I said, that is my argument that nobody seems willing to agree with me on. I have yet to change anyone’s mind.
I follow the same rule you do. An alternative is not an alternate.
I’ve never seen a group of smart people argue about the difference between affect and effect as I did in my last job.