Descriptivism and widespread misspelling

Question

If you search google for "fuscia" it asks "did you mean fuschia?". The correct spelling of the word is "fuchsia". (This was pointed out on the xkcd blog a while ago.)

So enough people are spelling fuchsia wrong that it's polluting Google's autocorrection algorithms. Now this got me thinking. If you're serious about your descriptivism, then it seems like you have to accept "fuschia" as a legitimate alternative spelling. Lots of people use it, so it's right, right? What do you think of this? Is "fuschia" acceptable? Is there some way to discount those misspellings and insist on the correct spelling?

This isn't some anomaly of the way google's autocorrection works. There are 10m hits for fuchsia, 4m for fuschia... Is this enough usage to make "fuschia" a legitimate alternative spelling? If not, what criteria do you use to decide when a misspelling becomes acceptable?

The OED, under ''frustum'' says "Also erron. 17-19 C 'frustrum'". How many centuries does it take to stop being an error? — Colin Fine, Oct 06 '10 at 11:56
@cindi I think, depressingly, "thru", "ur", "thier", "teh" will soon be candidates... — Seamus, Oct 06 '10 at 14:18
This question (and its answers) are giving me a bad case of http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6170 — J.T. Grimes, Jan 19 '11 at 19:34
Who are these straw person 'serious descriptivists' who are bound by their seriousness to accept an epiphenomenal search result as decisive on an issue of orthography? These would be the weakest sort of descriptivist straw men and women, I imagine. — jbelacqua, Mar 16 '11 at 04:37
@jgbelacqua Straw person? Really? That's how far politcal correctness has gone? — Seamus, Mar 16 '11 at 11:44
@seamus It's a joke! But, once you start with the straw people/person thing, it's hard to go back. — jbelacqua, Mar 16 '11 at 16:16
@seamus, And who are these straw persons of PC-ness whose extremity in the pursuit of PC-ness is revealed by my glib chattering? The weakest sort of ... . — jbelacqua, Mar 16 '11 at 16:28
Crosslinking: Will grammar errors become “correct” after enough people use them for long enough? How dangerous is the acceptance of common usage on traditional English? If the English language is always evolving, why do we need to learn and follow grammatical rules? — RegDwigнt, Aug 22 '12 at 08:56

RegDwigнt · Accepted Answer · 2010-10-06T13:37:37.530

12

Personally, I feel that am not in a position to decide such things, so I gladly leave the decision to people whose whole job it is to make such decisions. When a respected authority known for its descriptivism (say, Merriam-Webster) starts listing "fuschia" as a legitimate alternative spelling, I will be more inclined to accept it myself.

Until then, I am heavily biased towards "fuchsia". (Even doubly so because I am one of those few people who actually pronounce it [ˈfʊksja] rather than [ˈfjuːʃə]. In other words, as far as I am personally concerned, I just can't misspell the "chs" as "sch"; if anything, I am likely to misspell the word as "fuxia".)

edited Oct 06 '10 at 13:37

answered Oct 06 '10 at 10:54

RegDwigнt

97,231

I'd +1 but I can't quite get my head around the mispronounciation ... – Unsliced Oct 06 '10 at 10:57
3

@Unsliced: well, "fuchsia" derives from the name of one of the founding fathers of botany, Leonhart Fuchs. Before there's any misunderstanding, I am not arguing that [ˈfʊksja] is by any measure a correct English pronunciation. I am merely pointing out that personally, I can't wrap my head around pronouncing that man's name as [fjuːʃ]. And I am only mentioning that at all because I interpret this question as asking for subjective opinions. Otherwise, the second paragraph in my answer is completely off-topic, no discussion about that. – RegDwigнt Oct 06 '10 at 11:15
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unrelated note: "a respected authority known for their descriptivism" Does anyone else find this construction odd? Surely an entity like Merriam Webster takes "its" rather than "his/her/their" as its possessive? Unless you're taking MW to be a collective body, in which case the singular "authority" seems misleading. – Seamus Oct 06 '10 at 13:06
@Seamus: oh, that was just an accident, a refactoring bug. Originally, I was still talking about "people" in that sentence, hence the "their". Fixed. – RegDwigнt Oct 06 '10 at 13:37
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"A respected authority known for their descriptivism" is unexceptionable in British English, FWIW – Colin Fine Nov 12 '10 at 14:47
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And what makes someone become respected by their descriptivism? I mean, descriptivism is letting people decide; no special linguistic skills seem necessary for that. I think this answer ducks the problem. – CesarGon Mar 10 '11 at 20:19
@CesarGon: I thought I was openly admitting just that in the very first sentence. – RegDwigнt Mar 10 '11 at 20:21
@RegDwight: Yes, absolutely. That's why I think this is an answer that does not actually answer the question. I know you were clear about it; the answer is still a cop-out. ;-) – CesarGon Mar 10 '11 at 20:27

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 10 '11 at 19:01

5

I think fuscia -> fuschia instead of fuchsia happens because Google is looking for better spelling fairly close to the misspelled word, and fuscia -> fuchsia is two mistakes, according to Google's algorithm (you've dropped the h and you've swapped the s and c), whereas fuscia -> fuschia is one mistake. At some point, Google may very well special-case fuchsia to fix this problem. In fact, this hypothesis is verified by experiment. If you search for "fucshia," Google corrects it properly. If you search for "fucsia," Google thinks you're speaking Spanish.

answered Mar 10 '11 at 19:01

Peter Shor

88,407

Google's "did you mean..." function is not just a brilliant algorithm applied to their massively huge data; they also plain old use a spell checker. – goblinbox Mar 10 '11 at 20:42
I'd vote this one up twice if I could. – jbelacqua Mar 17 '11 at 01:38

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 06 '10 at 11:07

3

In general, misspellings or nonstandard grammar may become acceptable if they simplify things. So "thru" instead of "through" or "learned" instead of "learnt" work. This might apply in this case, but it's not very obvious.

But in this case there is the overriding principle that the name is derived from a proper name, because the plant was named after a guy named "Fuchs". And you need a much stronger case to change that.

answered Oct 06 '10 at 11:07

Peter Eisentraut

3,527

6

God I hate "thru". I truly do. – Seamus Oct 06 '10 at 13:06
2

"learned"/"learnt" is American/British, not nonstandard/standard. – mmyers Oct 06 '10 at 16:49
@mmyers: Well, clearly, the Americans started out with "learnt" as well, and then "learned" arose later as an initially nonstandard form. – Peter Eisentraut Oct 06 '10 at 19:05
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@Peter, COHA shows that learned has always been more common than learnt in American English. At least, since 1810. – nohat Oct 12 '10 at 00:36
@nohat: Cool resource. I'll offer dreamed/dreamt and burned/burnt as better examples then. Oddly, leaped/leapt has the opposite trend. – Peter Eisentraut Oct 12 '10 at 16:15
Learned/learnt is a bad example because 'learned' as an adjective ("learned gentleman") has always been spelled that way, not the least because it's often pronounced as two syllables. 'Learnt' is only used for the past tense of the verb. – Marthaª Nov 12 '10 at 15:30
"Learned"/"learnt" is now a question here: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4965/when-do-you-use-learnt-and-when-learned – Peter Mortensen Nov 20 '10 at 17:29
@PeterEisentraut The one that gets me is pled for the past tense of entering a plea: ‘He pled guilty to three charges.’ Apparently it’s an old fossil, some relic that stuck around as a regionalism. I can’t help it, but ‘pleaded’ always sound wrong to me, just as does using ‘leaded’ instead of ‘led’, ‘speeded’ instead of ‘sped’, ‘bleeded’ instead of ‘bled’, ‘feeded’ instead of ‘fed’, ‘breeded’ instead of ‘bred’, &c. I just can’t help myself, so I still say ‘pled’ for having entered a plea. – tchrist Feb 01 '12 at 05:02

Descriptivism and widespread misspelling

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