A Word Please
by June Casagrande

June Casagrande

As I reported in last week's News of the Jeered, a Catalina man recently propelled a bicycle forward with nothing more than the power of salesmanship. At least, that's what an article I was copy editing proclaimed. The truth is all he did was ride a bicycle. But the writer described his action as "peddling" instead of "pedaling," committing and error that would have reflected much worse on me than on the writer himself had I not caught it.

That's because (brace yourself, controversial remark coming), when you're writing, typos are OK. Everyone makes them, even professionals. That's why copy editors exist. And since copy editors make mistakes too -- for example, almost missing a misused reference to "peddling" -- you don't have to be ashamed of mistakes in your own writing as long as they're infrequent and not too incriminating.

Any mistake made out of haste instead of ignorance qualifies as not too incriminating. Even some mistakes made out of ignorance are OK, as long as the ignorance they reflect is common. For example, the best wordsmiths might not know that "chaise longue" is not spelled "chaise lounge." But if you confuse "there" with "their" repeatedly in the same document, people will think you don't know the difference. And that doesn't look too good.

"Peddling" for "pedaling," on the other hand, seems like an easy mistake for a writer to make, especially for those of us who write from the ear instead of the eye. But we should all know the difference. The verb "pedal" means, as paraphrased from "Webster's New World College Dictionary," to operate something by using the foot to press on a lever or pad. "Peddle" means to sell. And it's a good idea to keep the difference in the forefront of your mind when writing about either.

Last week's News of the Jeered also reported that, in a home in Beverly Hills, one room was so crammed with furniture that its fullness could be described with a reference to a dusty form of limestone. This one may be harder to guess than the peddling story. It's a reference to the common mistake "chalk full." Chalk, of course, is powdery limestone or any of a number of similar substances used for writing, like on a blackboard. "Chock" is an adverb meaning "as close or tight as can be," derived from the noun "chock," which means a block or wedge used to fill in space between two things, such as a wedge put under a wheel to keep it from rolling.

So the room in the house was "chock full" of furniture, not "chalk full."

The difference between "chock" and "chalk" is one of those things you either know or you don't. Many of us who do can't exactly brag about it: We know it because we're old enough to remember when the coffee brand Chock Full O' Nuts was popular.

My final item for this installment of News of the Jeered isn't really a mistake at all, yet it's something I only learned of very recently and now "fix" on a regular basis: I change "ambiance" to "ambience." But I do so not because "ambiance" is "wrong," but because the dictionary I use for copy editing, "Webster's New World College Dictionary," doesn't like it. In fact, this book doesn't even list it. But the fourth edition of the "American Heritage Dictionary" actually prefers "ambiance," listing "ambience" only as an alternate spelling.