Tuesday, December 18, 2007

December 18, 2007 - Becuase (for Because)

"Because the world is round," sang the Beatles, "it turns me on." And because a word (spelled wrong) is found, that turns me on. Although Becuase is found in the "low probability" section of the Ballard list, it never made it across my own universe of typos until I recently came across a blog that linked to another blog in the magazine New Scientist, where it was suggested that this could well be "the most common typo in the English language." The writer came to this tentative conclusion after typing Becuase into a "famous web search engine," which (mystifyingly for a moment) he thereafter refers to as FWSE (apparently what Google's lawyers prefer you call it), and getting an admittedly impressive 4,950,000 hits (although I only get 684,000). OhioLINK's results were far more modest: Becuase appears there nine times, and Cuas* five times. Therefore, I really doubt this claim is true, but even if it is, I'm at a loss for an explanation. Why is Becuase such a common typo? Just because. (Picture of the Beatles from Freewebs.com.)

Carol Reid

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