A new low-water mark in my erroneous ways: my 10/19/24 posting “striking language” actually appeared on this blog with a, um, striking typo in its third word, the surname of my old friend and colleague Ellen Kaisse (as I type it now, letter by letter, very slowly, so as to get it right on the first try; my rough drafts are veritable forests of typos, the product of seriously disabled fingers working at the speed of my thoughts). What my readers saw when this posting first appeared:
From Ellen Kaiise in e-mail to me
One of my typo specialties, the misplaced geminate (more on misplaced gemination below). What’s new about this example is that I failed to notice it through at least five passes of editing. And just now, when I looked at the stretch of text above, I had a moment when I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Presumably because the spelling wouldn’t affect the pronunciation in English: Kaise, Kaisse, Kaiise, Kaiisse, they’d all be pronounced /kes/. Compare this to the examples gogling, goggling, googling, googgling; in real life, again from my hand, the second of these occurred as a typo for the third, and the first two would be pronounced differently from the last two, so the error leaps out from the page.
