[QUOTE=According to Pliny]
The key questions is: How much unedited writing do you see in real life?
Most of the writing you read off-line is in newspapers and magazines.
[/QUOTE]
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.
Sailboat
“Ammendment” instead of “amendment”.
recepticle
propogation
accoustic
appologize
“have went”
“use to”
curiousity
‘lense’ for lens - I spend a lot of time on photography forums, and this annoys me.
‘could care less’ -gah! Total lack of logic!!
Others that were already mentioned.
Just remembered another one. Viola instead of voila. A lot of people seem to have strange ideas about certain musical instruments!
[QUOTE=Canadjun]
Just remembered another one. Viola instead of voila. A lot of people seem to have strange ideas about certain musical instruments!
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=fishbicycle]
curiousity
[/QUOTE]
I mentioned “peak” above. I just wanted to say that once, I read the following sentence somewhere on the web:
“My curiousity was peaked.”
Argh.
The differences between peek, peak and pique are apparently not well-known.
It’s masturbation, not masterbation. Damn Seinfeld and the “master of your domain” episode.
[QUOTE=Philster]
“syke” instead of “psyche” drives me nuts.
[/QUOTE]
Damn! You beat me to it. I actually saw that spelling used in someone’s online comic the other day. :smack:
Must. Not. Gaudere. 
[QUOTE=fishbicycle]
I mentioned “peak” above. I just wanted to say that once, I read the following sentence somewhere on the web:
“My curiousity was peaked.”
Argh.
The differences between peek, peak and pique are apparently not well-known.
[/QUOTE]
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’.
[QUOTE=Dervorin]
‘could care less’ -gah! Total lack of logic!!
[/QUOTE]
That’s not a misspelling, simply a widespread illogical figure of speech. And as we all know, English is entirely logical.
“per say” and “segway.” Gaaaaaaah.
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.
close instead of clothes. (does that make you open when you’re naked?)
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?
[QUOTE=fishbicycle]
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?
[/QUOTE]
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?
[QUOTE=According to Pliny]
The key questions is: How much unedited writing do you see in real life?
[/QUOTE]
Are you counting the volumes and volumes of eye-gougingly-awful email I get from my grammatically crippled co-workers?