Mistakes Were Made

I have tried hard to give up my long-time role as a grammar (and usage) curmudgeon. I know that my writing is far from perfect, as readers of this blog would surely point out.

However. 

When I read work that has been professionally copy-edited and still contains not just typos but what I've always called "thinkos" — examples that show the copy editor does not know what the usage should be — I can't help but groan.

I saw three such examples in the last day.

First was in a Star Tribune headline:

Discomfort is a noun. Discomfit is the verb this headline-writer was looking for, and the copy editor (assuming there still is one at the Strib) should have known that.*

The other two examples were the same error, occurring twice in the book I'm reading. It's a hard-cover novel published by Simon & Schuster:

That first instance appears on page 1 of the book! (Yes, I do correct errors in books I own.)

This peek/peak mistake is pretty unforgivable as a copy-editing error: I'm surprised that a spell-checker or grammar-checker didn't catch it. (Worst-case scenario: was it caught and the copy editor overruled the correction? Hah.)

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*Oh, gee, here I was writing this and I thought to look up whether discomfort is sometimes used as a verb and I found that it is, according to Merriam Webster online. That led me to Garner's Modern American Usage, Third Edition, which lists it as Stage 4: a form that has become virtually universal but is opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts. Sigh.

Thinking a bit more about the discomfort/discomfit choice, if it was a choice on the part of the Strib staff, I wonder if they're afraid their readers would be unfamiliar with the word discomfit and think that usage was a mistake. Sigh again.