I overheard a conference call in which someone said this a few days ago.
Problem:
The speaker used the wrong word for the verb after “We need to” in this statement.
Explanation:
The speaker who said “We need to error on the safe side.” was discussing a company policy with others on the conference call.
The word “error” is a noun and not a verb.
What the speaker should have used is the word “err”, which looks like “error” but is a verb that means to be mistaken or incorrect.
Perhaps the speaker simply mispronounced “err” (the verb) as “error” (the noun).
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:
- “err on the safe side” — 23,600 matches
- “error on the safe side” — 1,260 matches
This tells me that Web authors have used “err on the safe side” versus “error on the safe side” by a ratio of 18.7-to-1, which is good by not great.
Solution:
“We need to err on the side of caution.”