The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #57930   Message #914927
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
20-Mar-03 - 08:08 PM
Thread Name: BS: Spelling of names
Subject: RE: BS: Spelling of names
Not to worry. "Ghandi" is a very common mistake - I've seen it in newspapers often enough. See a word in print a few times and it starts to look probable, and the correct spelling can start to look wrong. There was a whole generation of kids who used to spell "beetles" as "beatle", because "beetle" started to look unfamiliar, which is how we mostly tell when a word is mispelt.

When I was a Social Worker, I had a colleague called McHarg, and we used to get each other's phone calls sometimes. Very confusing, particularly when we mistook the person calling for one of our own people. You get into a sort of spiral of cross purposes.