A letter published in the Nashua Telegraph:
In the May 29 edition of The Telegraph, I read the article written by Mr. Joseph Smith of The Associated Press. The article was about the National Spelling Bee.
It was with some humor that I read that students were “probing the depths of entomology.” Since they are studying for a spelling “bee,” I suppose it is possible that they were, in fact, studying “the branch of zoology dealing with insects.”
However, I think it is more likely they were probing the depths of etymology, which is “the derivation of a word.”
Both definitions are from the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. Since the word was spelled correctly and the sentence was grammatically correct, no automatic spell checker or grammar checker would have noted this as an error.
Perhaps The Telegraph should employ a human proofreader to avoid these kind of errors.
Allen HarderHudson
Read more spelling bee errors by starting here.
