5 Comments

Very interesting. I definitely agree with the distinction between the right word and the wrong word: people's use of the wrong word, when it's so easy to look things up, is irritating! I mentioned this article in a post of my own called Mind Your Language. There was a British humorist called Paul Jennings who sometimes created a fake dictionary from place names. (I wrote about him recently as he has been a great inspiration for me for many years.)

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Isn't "Decafhalon" a misspelling?

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Technically, they're all misspellings. ;-)

But in the spirit of the exercise, it should have been "Decafthlon".

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Actually, "caterpallor" changed 2 letters and therefore shouldn't have qualified.

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Good catch!

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