Monday, October 18, 2010

Gaurant*, Guarent* (for Guarant*)

I can't always guarantee you a pun-tastic post here; there are days when I simply can't make (non) sense of the typo in play. Guaranty, guarantor, guar gum, sure. But GAUR, GAUR, what begins with GAUR? (And why am I starting to sound like Dr. Seuss?) The truth is, very few words that are not proper nouns begin with the letters G-A-U-R. So few (just two, by my count: gaur, meaning a wild ox; and gaura, meaning a plant from the Evening Primrose family) that it's a bit surprising this particular typo gets made at all. There were only three occurrences of it in OhioLINK (all for the same title) and 55 in WorldCat. Still, that's no guarantee you won't find it your own catalog. (And as proof that it's worth it to keep poking around, even in seemingly barren ground, we eventually turned up 18 cases of Guarent* as well.)

(Gaur at the Toronto Zoo, October 15, 2006, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

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