Yeah. But some newspapers are so poorly edited that they should be considered functionally unedited; one example being the Washington Post’s free handout “The Express.” The Express is often full of simple homonym errors (when the writer uses a word that sounds like the correct word, for example “He took in the sites [sights] in our beautiful city” or “a hoard [horde] of termites.”
These errors can come from many sources: ignorance of the real word, and, um…well, that’s it really.
I don’t know why the editing is so bad in such an easily-breezed-through publication; I can read the entire thing on my commute, so a competent editor ought to be able to knock it out before lunch and then hit the martinis. Maybe the job has been given to someone’s mistress as a sinecure.
To expand on misspellings of voila, I’ve seen “wah-la,” “vwallah” “walla,” and numerous other misspellings that show the person using the word has no clue that it’s French.
That’s one of my grrrs as well as ‘lose-loose’. Then we have ‘conscious/conscience’ and ‘advise’ instead of ‘advice’, ‘of’ instead of the contraction ‘ve’, and one that I remarked upon just yesterday; additional 'l’s in words like ‘jealousy’ and ‘clingy’ making ‘jealously’ and ‘clingly’.
One that I particularly associate with the SDMB - “withdrawl”. Sometimes from otherwise quite well-written Dopers. Made me wonder if perhaps it is an alternative U.S. spelling, but it doesn’t seem to be.
That one’s just because it’s easy to type ‘ab’ instead of ‘aba’ when ‘a’ and ‘b’ are close to each other on the keyboard. Most of these are people writing what they say, and ‘withdrawl’ doesn’t qualify.
Hey, we got this far and nobody has mentioned “athiest.” Who are you athier than? How can you call yourself something if you don’t even know how to spell it?
reminds me of a woman in a roleplaying group I used to be in. besides athiest and additude (aka attitude) she persistantly spelled “rapist” as “rapest.” I always wondered if that meant a really really evil sex offender, in the sense of rape, raper, rapest?
