Friday, June 10, 2011

Eeks!


From a post on CNN.com, about Haiti's potential new prime minister:


Hundreds of thousands of those people are still eeking out existances in makeshift camps.

The verb is "eke" (though having to "eke out an existence" is enough to make anyone say "Eeks!"). It's a great crossword-puzzle word; in fact, it was in the crossword puzzle I did yesterday, the first one in months. (Funny how a word just seems to pop up everywhere, in clusters.) I think the gerund form threw this writer off. It should be "eking," which does look a little funny.

But it does make me wonder--where is the auto spell check? It--and the editors--missed "existance."

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