Take a Peak at This
Some weeks back, the lead editorial in The Washington Post interchanged the words peak and peek. Twice. Yeah, it’s a little surprising. After all, it’s one of the country’s leading newspapers, and you’d expect that even if the writer slipped up, one of the paper’s proofers would catch it.
Another surprising thing is that the words peek and peak are not among those most often interchanged. We have lots that are more troublesome, like affect-effect, it’s-its, and stationery-stationary, to name just a few. Anyone who needs a memory crutch on peek-vs-peak can mentally connect the two e’s in peek to two eyes, or link the a in peak to alp.
But by far the most interesting aspect of the slip-up, and the most useful for us, is this: if it happens to the pro’s on the Post, it can happen to any of us. We all have holes in our vocabularies, and a few crossed wires. Considering all the thousands of words in our vocabularies, it’s almost inevitable that we mis-learned some words years ago, and just never happened to unlearn them.
And there’s no sure way to prevent a similar goof from happening to us—any of us. And our spellcheckers won’t help. In fact, they may give add to the problem by giving us false confidence. The best way to reduce the danger is to go back to those old reliable human eyes—to enlist a competent proofer to comb through our drafts before we send them out.
While it’s possible that any one of us can make a one-in-a-thousand mistake like the peak-peak bobble, if you add a second reader, the odds shift to something like one in a million. That’s worth the trouble.
Posted by Dave at 8/20/2011 3:00 PM 
Categories: language, Syntax
Tags: LandaBooks Language grammar editing speech spelling syntax writing
Categories: language, Syntax
Tags: LandaBooks Language grammar editing speech spelling syntax writing
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