"You're going to change that, aren't you?" My cousin pointed to the offending subhead in a draft he was reading for me, his face showing something between surprise and disappointment that I'd let something so obvious slip by.

The subhead at the end of his accusing finger read "Running the Gantlet." His problem with it? He assumed it should have been "Gauntlet," because he'd seen it that way so many times. He was right that it's often spelled that way. But the two words are different, and from different languages. Gantlet is from a Swedish root meaning roughly "running down a lane," and was used to describe a military punishment in which the offender was forced to run between two rows of men who struck him as he passed. So we use it now to mean attacked or pressured from two or more directions—sort of like being between a rock and a hard place.

Gauntlet, on the other hand, comes from Old French by way of Middle English. It referred to a kind of armored glove worn by knights, and by association, is now used in reference to other gloves as well. To throw down the gauntlet means to challenge someone. Largely because of their similarity in spelling and pronunciation, the two words have been interchanged so often that each is now viewed by many editors as a different (but acceptable) spelling of the other. Many editors, but by no means all. So to be safe, it's a good idea to use them the way they were used in their respective parent languages. And to be extra safe, don't throw down either one when someone uses one of them differently.