Pwned, pregnany, and bligged.

The other day (or perhaps the otehr day, as will explained) Merriam-Webster's Web site had a nice piece (or pieve) on the term pwn and its origins. I knew about it, but it bears repeating:

Pwn is a lot like own, then, in the sense of 1b, "to have power or mastery over (someone)." (This is, of course, no coincidence. The word likely has its origin in a mistyping of own, what with the p and o being so close to one another on the QWERTY keyboard and all.)

I kind of like that, as someone who makes a lot of typos myself. Oh, sure, it looks all neat on screen now, but that's because I go back and fix it. But what frustrates me is that there are some words I screw up over and over again. You'd think that I would learn to stop my fingers from snarling the same words, but the muscle memory seems to have recorded the data wrong and is multiplying the error daily. Here are some of my constant screw-ups:

Error  /   Should be

near  /  neat

pieve  /  piece

ot  /  to

whcih  /  which

otehr  /  other

pregnany  /  pregnant

teh  /  the*

anythoing  /  anything

taht  /  that

qyeen  /  queen

chanfge  /  change
juts  /  just

pf  /  of

opf  /  of

tge  /  the

yu  /  you

corrext  /  correct

ekse  /  else
myabe  /  maybe

knoe  /  know

blig  /  blog

One of the things I like about Microsoft Word---yes, really!---is that if you make consistent errors like these you can add them to the AutoCorrect function so they are automatically fixed. Unlike a lot of Word functions, it doesn't make you want to put your fist through the screen. It does have its drawbacks---I can't have it always replace near with neat, obviously. Word sometimes can tell by context that I meant neat instead of near, but not always. And philosophically speaking, you'll never get the motivation to change your poor skills if you have something cleaning up your mess for you. But it is not nearly as annoying as the classic texting autocorrect, which has inspired so much hate.

Now, to show you what my typing is like when I go fast and don't correct my typing, here is the big sensational closing paragraph:

When I was a young men my father told me, "son, always remember that the quick brown fox jumpeed over the lazy dog." I said, "Thanks, Dad, but is sit not true that now is the tuime for all good men to come to the aoid of theiur party?" He said, 'Son, You've been watching too many stupid movies." The end.**


*Classic!

**How did we ever survive typewriters?