While doing our final year project, the best reference help we got all through out was internet. The huge amount of knowledge available at ur fingertips was really a marvel. I believe, it is the new blogging culture which has contributed heavily to this terabytes of material about anyhting and everything available on net. But even when making good use of this knowledge, we all conviniently forget that this information is unedited and ametuerish. Mistakes mostly spellings and misjudged uses rule the internet now.
Let me give you an example:
"If you believe the internet is the font of all wisdom, giving free reign to exercise their vocal chords". This sentence now correctly written will look something like this.
"If you believe the internet is the fount of all wisdom, giving free rein to exercise their vocal cords"
Very frequently mis-spelled or misunderstood are words like fount(meaning a source of desirable quality) which occur generally in phrases. Other eg:s are free-rein(meaning letting horse loose) which is substituted with free-reign(pointing to free rule), vocal chords(chords means tones and cords means strings).
Other widely misinterpreted words include sleight(slight) of hand, buck(butt) naked, shoo(shoe) in etc.
A pattern can be clearly seen emerging from these phrases. These mistaken phrases are all old and ones which originated from other languages like Greek. The new generation bloggers and other frequent net users with heard knowledge about these phrases use them with assumed meanings. True! new words are born this way, but the process takes nearly 100 years.
Are we on the onset of a new era where a small percentage of people decide the way a new word is born or restructured? Lets wait & see!
