Today I was reading an article about a school district's efforts to restrict the usage of MP3 players, video games, and cell phones on campus.
In the article, the author mentioned a disturbing trend in New York... "In New York City, public schools have long banned cell phones. Last spring, schools and police cracked down further by using mobile metal detectors in part to snuff out cell phones and iPods."
Mobile metal detectors can kill consumer electronics? That's what "snuff out" means. It originally meant to put out the flame on a candle, but has become a euphemism for murder.
Now, I think the reporter meant "sniff out". It's a much more apropos term, and "snuff" would be a very understandable typo for "sniff", since I and U are right next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard.
I don't bring that up to start evangelizing the Dvorak layout, but to warn against trusting computerized spelling and grammar checkers. They'll catch some of the more obvious errors, but there are times when the error could be a real word that is being used in a grammatically correct manner, but the transposition of those one or two letters has created a totally different meaning.
In this fast-paced world, we tend to rely on computerized tools so much that we end up trusting them too much. And while it slows you down to re-read what you just wrote, I do that with EVERYTHING, be it a simple e-mail or a more complex blog post.
Automated proofreading isn't bad. It's particularly good for catching the small errors we might otherwise gloss over. But it cant catch errors in meaning. It still takes a human to do that... at least for the time being.
UPDATE
Well, more fool me... he meant "snuff out". I just got an e-mail (I'd e-mailed him, he hasn't read this blog) where he clarified it. "Snuff out" does also have a meaning of merely stopping something, less violent than the meaning that immediately came to mind for me (perhaps I watch too many old gangster movies).
He did admit that because of the multiple meanings, it may not have been the best choice of phrase, but it was intentional, not a typo.
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