Google is usually great for helping sort out uses of English, so you can check the difference between a pedaller and a peddler -- though that doesn't stop Guardian journalists getting it wrong, of course. But there are times when the majority of people get things wrong. In today's Guardian, Patrick Barkham reports that "according to the Oxford English Corpus, a database of a billion words, dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English."
"Straight-laced" is used 66% of the time even though it should be written "strait-laced", according to lexicographers working for Oxford Dictionaries, who record the way English is spoken and written by monitoring books, television, radio and newspapers and, increasingly, websites and blogs.
"Just desserts" is used 58% of the time instead of the correct spelling, "just deserts" (desert is a variation of deserve), while 59% of all written examples of the phrase in the Corpus call it a "font of knowledge or wisdom" when it should be "fount".
Other common mistakes mentioned in the article include "free reign" for "free rein", "slight of hand" instead of "sleight", "phased by" for "fazed by", "butt naked" for "buck naked" and "vocal chords" for "vocal cords."
Bear this in mind the next time you use Google to check: it could be wrong.
Comment: We're already familiar with words ceasing to mean what they really mean and coming to mean something less precise or even different -- nice, enormity, prestigious, cohort, decimate, jejeune (should be jejune, from the Latin ieiunus: meager, dry, fasting) and so on. Phrases such as "prodigal son" and "begs the question" are also probably mis-used more often than not. Language changes. 'Twas ever thus....
