When Spell-Check Can’t Help

Spell-check can’t replace the keen eyes of an experienced editor.

So, let’s put those keen eyes and experience to work, and eliminate some of these embarrassing mix-ups involving similar-sounding words. Many of these are pointed out by careful readers who expect better of us. Granted, the readers are not working on deadline â€" but they aren’t New York Times writers and editors, either.

Here are the latest lapses, including many that we’ve seen before.

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Dr. Parkinson rented a ground-floor apartment on North Ninth Street, and spent his nights at Hotel Delmano and the Brooklyn Ale House and his days caffeinating at Atlas Cafe. He was adrift. “I knew I didn’t want to join a private practice,” he said. “I’d be the low man on the totem poll, get paid poorly and not be in control of my hours.”

Totem pole, of course.

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Based on the 1988 children’s novel by Roald Dahl, “Matilda” has the darkness and mordant tone of Dahl’s best-known novels, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach,” as the title character â€" a 5-year-old genius â€" faces off against parents who loath her, a barbaric headmistress and a classroom of “revolting children” (the title of one song).

The verb meaning to hate is “loathe.” “Loath” is an adjective meaning “reluctant.” I am loath to admit it, but we get this wrong all the time.

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But criticism does not phase her; her career is a lesson in defying expectations.

We meant “faze”; this, like some of the other examples, was eventually fixed.

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But my older son, who was closer to the action, raced upstairs shouting that a raccoon was sitting on the mantle.

As The Times’s stylebook points out, this spelling means a cloak. For the shelf over the fireplace, use “mantel.”

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He also relocated a washer and dryer so the foyer could be made wide enough to display his colorful swirling canvasses.

Someone conducting a poll “canvasses.” A painter works on “canvases.”

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Since Mr. Ryan’s House budget is expected to be contrary to Mr. Obama’s plan, it is unclear what might come of the luncheon parlay.

Make it “parley,” meaning a discussion; “parlay” means bet.

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This airy, whitewashed outpost of a cult-favorite vegan mini-chain is welcoming hoards of yoginis, raw food devotees and curiosity seekers.

Here, we meant “hordes,” or crowds …

There are many reasons Apple has not spent its cash horde, but I’ll bet anything that one of them is the uncertain economic and tax environment in this country.

… and here, we meant “hoard,” or supply.

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To whit: Mr. Turetsky, 35, graduated from Rutgers in 2000, but spent the better part of the next decade at Columbia working on a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience.

“Wit,” not “whit,” in this expression.

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I was on a freighter heading through the Bahamas. The sweeping view couldn’t have been more different from the one on deck: shrink-wrapped palettes cradled cinderblocks, baby diapers and bottled water obscured the bow; oiled two-by-eight planks concealed crates of produce, furniture and hardware stowed in the cargo hold.

A painter uses a “palette”; a “palate” is the roof of your mouth; and a shipping platform is a “pallet.”

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Cloistered behind walls in Evansville, Ind., she prayed eight times daily, baked communal wafers and was not permitted contact with the public. “I wasn’t allowed to look up at the blue sky because it would detract from prayer,” Sister Cecelia said.

Not exactly a homonym problem, but a mix-up nonetheless; we presumably meant “communion” wafers.

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Heidi Beirich, who tracks hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has listed Ms. Geller’s blog since 2009, said her ads subscribe “bad motives to all Muslims.”

Here, too, we were led astray by a similar word. We meant “ascribe,” not “subscribe.”

 
In a Word

This week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

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If a meteor was found to be just days from hitting Earth, there is little that could be done, except perhaps evacuating a city or region.

Use the subjunctive for a hypothetical construction like this: “If a meteor were found …”

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Of the five million stops in New York that the police have recorded since 2004, some 88 percent of those encounters ended with the person’s walking away without a summons or an arrest.

Having said “of the five million stops,” we didn’t need “of those encounters.”

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Another talking point in the document, which spells or transliterates Mr. Netanyahu’s name two different ways, suggest that Mr. Abbas should implore Mr. Obama to persuade Mr. Netanhyahu to say that Israel’s 1967 borders could be the starting point for negotiations, as Mr. Obama has suggested.

Make it “Another talking point … suggests.” And while we’re at it, let’s pare down or break up this overstuffed sentence.

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The method used was cloning â€" using frozen cells of the last of the animals to try to create a new one, much like Dolly the sheep was cloned from a frozen udder cell of a sheep that had died years before.

“Like” should not introduce a clause. One possible fix: “just as Dolly the sheep was cloned …”

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But concern about chemical weapons in Syria were a major focus of the day.

Another agreement problem. Make it “concern … was.”

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Ms. Dye, who worked as a personal trainer at a gym the couple owned, explained in her petition that since telling her husband she wanted a divorce because of his infidelity, he had repeatedly threatened to kill her.

A dangler. “Telling” does not refer to “he.” One simple fix is to replace the participle: “since she told her husband …”

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In other words, it tries to solve a problem that is often summed up with the abbreviation T.L., D.R.: “too long, didn’t read.”

On the rare occasions we use online slang expressions like this for effect (LOL, OMG, etc.), render them as readers most often see them â€" in this case: tl;dr. (Lowercase, no points, no space).

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A promenade outside of Mumbai adorned with a mural by Rouble Nagi. The prime season for tourism there is ending as temperatures rise ahead of monsoons.

No need for two prepositions; delete “of.”

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Indeed, Ms. Neufer, a self-proclaimed hippie (“I will be forever in my heart, and in my mind,” she said), started smoking at 21 and has been growing pot in her backyard and organizing drug-fueled sing-a-longs ever since.

This is a compound of two words, not three, but in any case the dictionary wants “singalong.”

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To Mr. Shapiro’s oldest daughter, Liat, who recently celebrated her Bat Mitzvah, he said, “mazel tov.”

Per the stylebook, “bat mitzvah” and “bar mitzvah” should be lowercase.

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And therein lies the not-to-be-dismissed charms of the winning Encores! concert production of “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman,” which runs through Sunday.

The construction is inverted, but the subject is the plural “charms,” so the verb should be “lie.”

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As a cantor sang the Jewish memorial prayer, “Eyl moleh rahamim,” the president kept his head low and occasionally closed his eyes.

The stylebook calls for the spelling “El Malei Rahamim.”

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In 2008, when he was 20, Jornet defeated a field that included Scott Jurek, perhaps the sport’s most well known star, while setting a record for the 104-mile course around the Mont Blanc massif.

This is a frequent error. Make it “best-known.”

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It is easy to view the new Mississippi law with an ironic eye. As Representative Omeria Scott, a Democrat, pointed out during the debate on the bill, “Mississippi is the fattest and most unhealthy state in the U.S.A.”

It is easy, too easy, for us to view anything that way, judging from the more than 1,800 uses of “irony” and “ironic” in The Times in the past year, not all of them in quotes. We often misuse it, and we often use it when we should trust the reader to notice it without our help. As the stylebook notes:

irony, in precise usage, is a restrained form of sarcasm in which the intent of a phrase differs from its literal meaning, often for rhetorical effect (His brilliant plan nearly bankrupted the company). The looser use of irony and ironically, to mean an incongruous turn of events, is trite. Not every coincidence, curiosity, oddity and paradox is an irony, even loosely. And where irony does exist, sophisticated writing counts on the reader to recognize it.

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DENVER â€" As Colorado’s governor signed a hard-won package of gun control measures on Wednesday, officials across the state were reeling from the seemingly inexplicable shooting death of the state’s prisons chief, who was gunned down at the front door of his home.

Unnecessary hyperventilation. Delete, along with the “grasping for answers” in the second paragraph. It’s not that hard to figure out why someone in criminal justice or law enforcement might be a target, as the story itself notes later.

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Klinsmann has been reticent to elaborate on his thoughts on Donovan’s situation.

“Reticent” means reserved; we wanted “reluctant.”

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“We lost a million dollars worth of equipment,” said the league president, Michael Colini, a police officer who lives in New Dorp.

“Dollars” needed an apostrophe here: “… a million dollars’ worth …”

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The 10-year anniversary of the American invasion came and went on Tuesday with barely passing notice in a town once consumed by it.

Redundant; it’s just the “10th anniversary.”

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Ms. Quinn, the City Council speaker, said that she never enjoyed exercise â€" “hated it, hated it, hated it, hated it” â€" but that the demands of the campaign required it. “Every other time I’ve run for office I have gained weight,” she said. At evening events, she skips canapés for crudité (but no dip).

The term is plural: crudités.