Please Note (word choice crankiness division):

[gnomi]

(And, please further note, none of this is directed toward anyone reading here...I've just gotten fed up.)

Word confusion is everywhere. Here are some quick pointers:

Rein and reign: You reign over a land. You give someone free rein.

(also? People are never, never given "free rain." Well, I guess one does not have to pay for weather events. But... no. Never.)

Phase and faze: You can be going through a phase. Characters on certain science fiction television shows can be out of phase. They may or may not be fazed by this turn of events.

Thank you.

Comments

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

It's an easy thing to screw up when you're typing. I totally agree. But there are ones -- like the two I list here -- that I see in professionally published materials, and that just makes me twitch like a great twitching thing. Somewhere along the line, that should've been caught and fixed.

[samcdermott65.livejournal.com]

I get twitchy too when I see typos in published works. Makes you wonder if the piece ever got read. These types of errors aren't caught in spell check. They require the human eye. Many publishers have gotten sloppy.

shari

[samcdermott65.livejournal.com]

Shit I did it again! Grrrr! Sorry Nomi!

shari

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

S'okay. :-)

And I agree with you -- publishers should be having actual people look at the manuscripts closely. The general metric is that every editorial pass catches 50% of the remaining errors. So the more passes you have, the more likely you are to catch errors. And it's the obvious ones -- the mixed-up words, the out-and-out typos -- that really bug me.

[half-double.livejournal.com]

publishers should be having actual people look at the manuscripts closely

If only. The most recent anthology I'm in? About which I have already kvetched? In one of the essays there is a reference to that classic Disney ditty, "Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"

I'm willing to wager quite a lot of money that that error was not in the essay as originally submitted.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Oh, yikes. Editing introducing errors is my worst nightmare, editorialwise.