This post by Matt Yglesias, while not especially noteworthy in terms of content, offers an example of something that’s been bugging me for a while now. Check out this snippet:
For quite a long time now people have been urging Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to run for hire office[...]
Note the homophone. I’ve seen these pop up quite a lot lately in blog posts, and while I haven’t been tracking carefully, I think Yglesias and Ezra Klein are the worst (maybe only) offenders. I don’t recall seeing homophone typos much, if ever, before, except when people forget their/they’re/there or other similar rules. Are they using voice transcription? Is it just a stupid spell-check error? Signifiers of unedited authenticity? None of those seem right to me for various reasons – I can’t imagine why they’d want to use transcription and I think I would have noticed spell-check errors long ago. Ideas?
You said it, sister