“Do to limitations …”

Devolution toward Simpler, Idioms

I saw this in a technical document.

Problem:
“Do” is the wrong word here.

Explanation:
“Due” is the right word here because “due to” is an idiom that means attributable to.

The writer could have missed the mistake because “do” and “due” sound alike to most Americans.

The writer could have made the mistake because he or she did not know that “due” is the correct word.

In any case, I believe that use of “do” in place of “due” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It’s simpler to write “do” (two letters) than to write “due” (three letters).

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following phrases (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “due to limitations” — 703,000 matches
  • “do to limitations” — 505 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the idiom correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 1,392:1, which is excellent!

Solution:
“Due to limitations …”