![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVlZ1b_bV6154sLyBT6QskFiFPeBldMBFeAydYpnig8j5LtCiJXxfcDzGbwSP5iJMkS5QXxadRb0hmKWk_XLWEkmzcJY_L4u8bFRyM_ioHvI2aquxkw4-AxuD4Mf7B-MsjCohyphenhyphenAdBZVhJ7/s1600/Mourning_Courtiers_from_a_Tomb.jpg)
I was contemplating whether or not typos ever arise from a confusion or conflation of the words
courts and
counties and then I couldn't get the absurdly cute word
courties out of my head! What would "courties" even be, I thought, if "courties" there were? Would they be like baby court jesters, or fanatical trial watchers, or the kind of people who get dated a lot, or what? When I searched for this potential error in OhioLINK, I got a single record, for a book about an 18th-century Indian lawyer, with the subject heading:
Maharashtra (India) -- Courts and courties [i.e., courtiers]
-- Biography. I really wanted to
court this one today, but with such scant evidence at hand, I felt as though I had no choice but to dismiss the case. Instead, we'll have to take a different
course, with the somewhat more commonly seen typo
Courst. We counted five of these linguistic miscreants in OhioLINK, and 54 in WorldCat.
(Fourteenth-century mourning courtiers from a tomb, carved by Jaune Cascalls, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
Carol Reid
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