Proofs arrived for the new textbook that Rodney Huddleston and I have been writing for the past year. Always an exciting moment. But I have to confess that my heart sank when I saw the cover letter:
Dear Prof Pullum, [So far so good: that's my surname.]
Please find enclosed one set of page proofs for the book:
"A Student's Introduction to English Grammer". [Oops!]
Even though I have offered a conjectured explanation of why this misspelling is so common, it still shocked me to see it in a letter from an excellent typesetting company accompanying the proofs of a book that (I was glad to see) spelled the word correctly on the title page that followed.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at October 24, 2004 01:34 PM