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by saurik 3268 days ago
FWIW, I absolutely believe that a human would make those kinds of typos while typing... I myself didn't realize "flair for criticism" was spelled like that (and the top hit searching on Google for that, without quotes, is actually a book title using the other spelling, though it may very well have been a purposeful pun...). It would be one thing if those weren't themselves "correctly spelled words" (and so a text editor might catch it), but both "flare" and "fare" could easily slip by unnoticed. I will often even make much more interesting typos, where the word just "sounds sort of like the other word but no one would ever confuse the two", as I tend to speak to myself in my head as I type (and as I read) and I swear all language in my brain is at some point represented as audio... I'm not coming up with any examples right now, but trust me that when they come up they are incredibly strange.
1 comments

Only slightly tangential, have you come across the term eggcorn[1] before?

I always get a chuckle out of thinking about it.

1. In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn