Misspellings

“The tool it’s self seems …”

Misspellings, Possessives, Pronouns

My wife saw this on Amazon.com.

Problem:
The reflexive pronoun is triply misspelled.

Explanation:
My wife was researching a carpentry tool on Amazon.com.

She was reading comments from those who had bought the tool when she came across “The tool it’s self seems …”.

The obvious solution is to replace I-T-APOSTROPHE-S-SPACE-S-E-L-F with the reflexive pronoun “itself” — spelled I-T-S-E-L-F.

What fascinates me is how the commenter managed to make three spelling mistakes in the process of misspelling this pronoun.

  1. Mistake #1 was to assume that reflexive pronouns are always formed by combining a possessive pronoun with the word “self”.
  2. Mistake #2 was to assume that a space should appear between such a possessive pronoun and the word “self”.
  3. Mistake #3 was to misspell the possessive pronoun “its” as I-T-APOSTROPHE-S.

Let us discuss these three mistakes in reverse order.

If we undo mistake #3, then we get “its self” — spelled I-T-S-SPACE-S-E-L-F.

If we undo mistake #2, then we get “itsself” — spelled I-T-S-S-E-L-F.

If we undo mistake #1, then we get “itself” — spelled I-T-S-E-L-F.

Solution:
“The tool itself seems …”

“He sites the following historic quotes …”

Misspellings, Verbs

I saw this recently on a website.

Problem:
The writer used the wrong verb.

Explanation:
The full sentence was “He sites the following historic quotes regarding Thanksgiving.”

The verb “site” — spelled S-I-T-E — means to place, situate or locate at or on a site.

It is clear that the writer of the sentence was trying to say “refers to” when he wrote “site” with an “s”.

So the writer should have used the verb “cite” — spelled C-I-T-E — which means to quote, especially as an authority.

Solution:
“He cites the following historic quotes …”

“ALWAYS VISABLE”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Misspellings

I saw this on a website.

Problem:
The adjective is misspelled — in capital letters, no less!

Explanation:
The adjective “visible” — misspelled as V-I-S-A-B-L-E — appeared in a banner advertisement on the MEN7 website, which I discovered after seeing a television program called “MEN7” on the ION network a few nights ago.

The website’s banner ad was for something called “Billionaires Car Club”.

The full text of the all-capital-letters ad was “LAMBORGHINI, MURCIELAGO | PRICE TO OWN $350K | ALWAYS VISABLE | SEE IT ON BILLIONAIRES CAR CLUB”.

I was not surprised to see the adjective “visible” misspelled by a website and TV program focused on fast cars and the male equivalent of “Cosmopolitan” magazine instead of on more intellectual pursuits.

But seeing the adjective “visible” spelled with an “a” in the middle made me wonder how typical this blunder was.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “visible” — 238,000,000 matches
  • “visable” — 723,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 329-to-1, which is superb.

However, nearly three-quarters of a million misspellings tells me that spelling the adjective “visible” with an “a” is a common English blunder.

I believe that this blunder is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

It is simpler to pronounce this adjective as if there were an “a” in the middle than to clearly pronounce the “i” in the middle.

And I believe that this mispronunciation drives the misspelling.

Solution:
“ALWAYS VISIBLE”