Reading this article on Yahoo! Shine had me wondering: What happens when a “mega-mansion” is struck by lightening? It gets lighter. Black turns to gray; beige turns to white; red turns to pink. It could be worse: It could be struck by lightning. That would be bad. Like, burning up the house bad.
Not really bad, but really wrong was failure to capitalize Boy Scout:
A premiere is the opening or debut of a movie or play. Premier means “first in position or rank.” Guess which word the writer should have used here:
Oh, this is relatively unimportant after those errors, but the writer placed that period in the wrong place. It belongs after the right parenthesis because it applies to the entire sentence, not just the words in the parens.
September 14, 2011 at 1:20 pm
Lightening used to mean lightning before the words’ senses differentiated. Alas, I don’t think that’s the reason for the common contemporary confusion.
September 14, 2011 at 1:26 pm
I think I can safely say that the Yahoo! Shine writer was unaware of the history of the word. As was I. Thanks for the explanation!
September 14, 2011 at 1:38 pm
You’re welcome. (Good ol’ OED!) I suppose it’s easy to arrive at the misspelling by thinking of electricity lightening up the sky. But it oughtn’t to have passed an editor’s eye.
September 14, 2011 at 2:00 pm
True. Any competent editor would have caught that. But I’m not sure Yahoo! Shine employs editors (though their writers sport that title) — competent or otherwise. It’s a shame, really, because some of these articles could be quite entertaining if it weren’t for many mistakes.