Oh my freaking lord.

Dana, it's cruel to make a seven-months-pregnant woman laugh so hard.

They were all beautifully atrocioius, but for sheer non-sequiturness I think the Florida Marlins reference wins my vote.

... So, Google isn't picking it up.

Can I have a link to this woman's website?

Sometimes I feel like the only person left who knows the difference between "reign" and "rein."

No. No, you're not. I practically give universal recs anytime I see it used correctly.

Can I have a link to this woman's website?

a) I wouldn't want to link to the site anyway, because of referrer logs, and

b) She doesn't have one. It's posted on a Nikita board.

I reserve my scorn for 'phase' and 'faze' substitutions.

Even for a horsey type, it's easy to type reign for rein, and then the freaking spellcheck doesn't catch it.

And, err, *ifyou'renotusingbetas* it can slip through.

Though I caught it the one time I typed it wrong, it was in a beta'd story, and it didn't slip through, I'm always worried that it will.

Being as I'm using betas less and less for shorter material. Which is an uncomfortable thing to admit to, but true.

Coastal, for example, I didn't send through a beta pass. I just re-read and tweaked with it a few days later, when I got home from L.A. I feel like I'm going to hell for this.

Past and passed is my particular red flag.

Honestly? I make more of those kinds of mistakes since I became an editor than I did before. Usually I catch them as I'm typing, but it really annoys me. Because in my mind, rein and reign or their and there and other homophones aren't (weren't) remotely the same word. When I started really editing other people's work, I had to school myself to think of them that way to make sure I caught any misuse. So now the association is there, and my fingers aren't always on the same wavelength with my brain.

But yeah, people use betas for a reason, and if they don't they should learn to check their work for things like this. I can forgive it once in a while, or in a quick drabble that someone throws up, but my patience is limited.

I mistype homophones all the time, but I've seen "free reign" used so often and so consistently that I'm convinced it's almost always a true mistake rather than a mere typo. Same for "tow the party line," which drives me equally batshit.

I give passes to most homophone errors, if they're rare.

Still makes me laugh every time I see "baited breath", though.

And I'm with Susan: I grind my teeth every time someone misuses an old expression like "loose cannon" or "toe the line", showing with breathtaking clarity his/her failure to understand the literal/historical meaning of the expression.

Actually the one thing that absolutely guarantees my inability to read far is rampant misuse of punctuation. I used to know a brilliant writer who couldn't/didn't edit for shit, and was riddled with misspellings and short line, long line disease etc. But she used punctuation pretty well, and I could read her just fine; whereas a lot of the bad fanfic either jumps blissfully into a sea of comma splices or eschews punctuation marks entirely.