I don’t think anyone (or is that “any one”? ;)) has mentioned “anyway” vs. “any way”, another in the same pattern. “I don’t know anyway to do this.” :rolleyes: And “setup” vs. “set up”: “It only takes about five minutes to setup.”
I wouldn’t necessarily characterize misuse of “effect” and “affect” as spelling errors. They might be, but I suspect in most cases the writer hasn’t even thought through the fact that these are completely different words with different meanings, and are not even the same part of speech. Neither one is a mind-boggling spelling challenge if one is aware of their existence as distinct words.
This seems quite wrong to me in the context to which you replied. Homonyms are obviously irrelevant in speech. Someone ignorant of distinctions between heterographs like “reign” and “rein” will expose that particular ignorance only in written communication. And it takes no deep knowledge of its etymology to understand the origin of “rein in”.
Apparently Shakespeare was also illiterate:
A man no mightier than thyself or me … http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.1.3.html
The argument has been made (by Pinker, Pullum, and others) that the case of pronouns in a conjunctive phrase need not be the same case as the phrase itself (thus, the common “Me and Alice are going to the movies”) and that common usage has normalized that practice to the point that the strict prescriptivist rule would in many situations regard such a person as engaging in hypercorrection, or what is technically referred to as “sounding like a dork”.
