Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
My objection to it in this particular case is not its common (mis)usage in everyday speech, but the fact that Mr. Spoor has a paleontologist use it in a conversation with a professional colleague. Regardless of its everyday "misuse", I'm absolutely certain that a professional in the field would not get it wrong.
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As someone who edits highly technical articles, my only response to this is...
I've seen scientists spell genus and species names wrong, spell the names of chemicals wrong, spell their own e-mail addresses wrong... And yes, they've spelled the names of co-authors wrong. Le sigh.
And then of course there are terms that are spelled more than one way in the same field. For example, at my first job, our resident hydrologist preferred "ground water" while many of the other scientists kept trying o change it to "groundwater." Eventually he decided they were right after all, so we had to update a lot of documents.