He actually wrote back

I regularly go to The Register's news site for their very funny takes on the IT news for the day. The site gives me my news with a nice anecdote to remember it by. And come to think of it, it makes me smile at least once a day. That's a good thing, right?

Yesterday, as per my habit, I went to the site and was reading The Register's take on the report by Danish researchers concluding that cell phones are safe and do not cause cancer (something that I blogged about in one of my posts yesterday).

Towards the end of the article, I noticed this:

Of course, this is unlikely to plicate the Campaigners Against Stuff who will point out that the study only shows no evidence of risk; it does not prove there is no risk.

What caught my eye was the use of the word plicate.

Now plicate (according to this free dictionary I have) means "pleat". And I did not see how that was relevant to the topic. Which made me think that the author, Bill Ray, wanted to say placate, which means pacify...and which sounds congruous to the article.

Since I had seen a similar gaffe in print earlier, I thought I will write to Bill to point this out.

So my mail to him looked like this:

Hi Bill

Let me begin by saying that I love TheReg and am on your site
pretty much every day.

But I just want to know if there is a spell checker that gets enforced before the story is submitted. Cause at the very end of your last article on Mobile phones being safe to use, you mention - and I quote - "Of course, this is unlikely to plicate the Campaigners Against Stuff....."

Did you actually mean plicate or placate? Or am I not getting the meaning of what you want to say correctly?

I remember a similar grammatical goof up I read about last month which I blogged about here.

But what do I know?

Just checking...

And once again, I love ElReg, so keep up the good work.

Cheers

I was pleasantly surprised to see Bill's reply in my mailbox this morning:

Glad you like the site, but the fault here is entirely mine.
Spellcheckers are so ubiquitous one does start to rely on them when one should really be reading with more care. I'm not convinced that"plicate" is even an English word (Cambridge dictionary seems to agree that it isn't, but the Word spellchecker is convinced it is; so I suspend judgement).

Of course, we do have a sub-editor who really should spot these things, not to mention an editor too, so I'm not taking all the blame myself.

Just for reference: it didn't placate them, as my mailbox
testifies.

Bill.

Glad to see your reply, Bill. Thanx for taking the time.

I just went from being a regular TheReg visitor to an avid fan. Keep up the good work, folks at ElReg. No matter how many people it does not plicate!