I’ve been reading a comic book series called “The Boys” by Garth Ennis. Now Ennis is an A-list writer. He’s got a number of very popular books out there, and the Boys is quite well written and very popular. I was loving it. Except that they keep using “discrete” when they mean “discreet”. And this is a comic about superhero spying, so it happens a LOT, across issues! I find such a mistake absolutely incredible, to the extent that it detracts from my enjoyment of the comic. I mean it’s one thing to constantly see this mistake on message boards(yes, I’m looking at you, SDMB), but in a published comic book, that I’m sure has to be edited, and proof read by people whose job it is to know the English language and know it well? Have you ever noticed anything of the sort?
In “Pippa Passes”:
[QUOTE=Robert Browning]
Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
[/QUOTE]
Mr Browning thought a “twat” was an item of nun’s clothing, rather than a part of her body that a good nun would never use. He had led a sheltered life.
Not exactly “published”, but when I was teaching English here in the US, I thought my students were the most aggressive people I had ever met. On homework assignments they would constantly write sentences like:
“I defiantly will go to Europe.”
“Regardless of what others think, I defiantly agree that abortion is a woman’s right.”
It took me awhile to figure out these clowns would always misspell the word “definitely” and, when using spell check, they simply clicked on the first option that showed up on the list - and that first word on the list of spelling options is “defiantly”.
Just wondering if the OP’s example about “discrete/discreet” is a similar spell check blunder.
I recently read a memoir (commercially published) about my local music scene.
It was constantly talking about people who were “formally” with different bands. I swear that was used at least twenty times. It made me want to hunt down the person responsible and teach them the difference between formal and former. With knives.
Spelling has only been standardized for about 200 years, so no dog-piling on Book of Genesis for “The serpent was subtil.”
In comics, an issue of Wolverine had to be pulped when their spellchecker changed “killer” to “kike.” It wasn’t noticed until after the issue had been printed.
Malcolm Gladwell took a lot of ribbing for misspelling a word he’d only ever heard, not seen written. I forget the specific details, though.
It’s hard to beat the Sinner’s Bible of 1631, which accidentally omitted a rather crucial word from the 7th commandment. This rendered God’s instruction as: “Thou shalt commit adultery”.
Details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible
I see things like this all the time: “assent” instead of “ascent,” “combing” instead of “coaming,” “hanger” instead of “hangar,” “gorilla” instead of “guerrilla,” and so on.
Given the IQ of the average American, and the quality of education in the US, I’m not at all surprised. Spell check just makes a bad situation worse.
[tangent]Thanks to you (and google) I just learned a new word. Thanks :)[/tangent]
I used to get peeved about the constant use of the word “disinterested” as “uninterested” rather than “impartial” (“He was disinterested in continuing the conversation”). But I came to accept that the primary definition of the word is changing as the “uninterested” meaning drives out the “impartial”. Languages do that, and there’s not point in bitching. Still grates on me, though.
I disagree about “disinterested.” See definition 1a.
Ran across a good one on an Amazon forum frequented by self-published authors – “perianally” instead of “perennially”. 
On the other hand, this opens up all sorts of possibilities if you have a dirty mind. 
Douglas Brinkley’s recent book on Walter Cronkite had a profusion of spelling, typo and logical errors that drove me crazy. In the end, I put it down to the new publishing model of taking an author’s manuscript and putting it between two slices of cover, with as little editing and review as possible. It had so many flaws - unexpected, from this level of author, publisher and subject - that I started keeping track of them in EverNote.
[ul]
[li]Several times on early pages he refers to Cronkite having a “flare” for this or that[/li][li]He refers to Cronkite passing F-106s in their bunkers in Vietnam. (The 106 was, rather famously, never deployed in VN)[/li][li]He uses “vis a vis” to mean “via”[/li][li]He several times uses “golden rule” to mean “never customarily broken”[/li][li]He twice refers to Cronkite “earning an honorary degree”[/li][li]…and he uses “fulsomely” to mean “enthusiastically”[/li][/ul]
This, from one of the most distinguished biohistorians of our time, a Rice University professor and a writer for the loftiest magazines in print.
These are errors anyone writing a complex book could make, but a simple proofreading, copy edit and/or fact check would have caught them all. I read a half dozen or more such books a year, and sometimes catch a single such error in one.
And for a lot of people, it’s the only commandment they obey.
Jack McDevitt had a short story that was supposed to be called “The Fort Moxie Branch.” The copyeditor titled the story “The Fourth Moxie Branch,” and that’s the title that ran on the top of each page. Not sure how no one missed that one; I realize the title tends to be overlooked, but I noticed it as I was reading the story, so someone else should have.
[quote=“NitroPress, post:13, topic:645469”]
[li]He twice refers to Cronkite “earning an honorary degree”[/li][/QUOTE]
It took me a minute to find the error in this example.
I once had a copy of ‘What Katy Did’, which replaced all uses of the word ‘angel’ with ‘angle’.
“Katy is a perfect angle!”
My wife and I purchased a coloring book for our niece. After giving the gift, I was leafing through it boredly, when I came across an amusing error. It was a scene of The Great Barrier Reef. I wish I had taken a pic of the error - it was the exact image as above, except that the caption read “…the OK Barrier Reef…” I laughed and laughed and laughed. Sent an email to the publisher, and received a copy of the corrected book via overnight express mail, must’ve cost fifteen bucks for postage, the above image in .pdf format, and the following email :
It’s subtle. I have another note that’s vague and I have no time to look it up, but he repeats the error with respect to other awards and medals that Cronkite “earned.” Sloppy thinking from an academic writer who is in line to “earn” a lot of awards with his best work and should know better on a very immediate level.
Is the issue the use of the word “earning”? Why can’t you “earn” an honorary degree through extra-academic accomplishments? I see no problem with that use of the phrase.