[LMB] OT: phrases to hate

[Howard Brazee]

Rebecca Eschliman wrote:

 

> There was one error I read years ago that I remember with great fondness 
> because of the mental imagery it provided:
>
> a taught abdomen
>
> I immediately veered away from the story itself to wonder about the 
> abdomen's education -- was it a degree program? what was included in the 
> curriculum? what was the graduation ceremony like?
>
>   
That would be an interesting pun in a discussion of belly dancing.  

What we don't get from reading is the type of mistake some of us grew up 
with larger reading vocabularies than speaking vocabularies.   Examples 
of my ignorance included:

I pronounced hogshead as hog-shed.

When the Gemini space program came around, I had no idea that a 
ron-de-view that the astronauts had was the same thing as a rendezvous 
that I read about in fiction.

I also didn't recognize the orderbs my mom made with the hors d'oeuvre 
that I read about in books.   I also didn't know how to pluralize that 
term.   

I'd love it if hobbyists would work on open source spell checking that 
would recognize "hors d'oeuvre", "blu-ray", and when I add words to its 
dictionary, I could put in the part of speech, the plural, 
capitalization quirks (iPod, Howard), whether a word is only acceptable 
as part of a phrase, and my most common misspellings (orderb).