Search the Web for `Missippi' and you'd find thousands of hits showing pages
where the authors clearly meant Mississippi. With the advent of modern
computers and spell-checkers you'd think this illustration of haplography
will not occur so often. If you feel this is bad, imagine the time before
the printing press came along, when the only way to make copies of a book
was with a quill and parchment. Sorry, no photocopying machines to crank
out double-sided copies there. Biblical translations and copies of other
books from olden times are replete with haplography and its cousins. Many
scholars spend their lifetime identifying these `bugs' in ancient books
and other scripts.

A counterpart of haplography is haplology (AWAD, May 15, 2000). Haplology
occurs when one `eats' a few letters while pronouncing a word. Latin nutrix
(nurse) came from earlier nutritrix. Chancery, a contraction of chancellery,
is now an acceptable part of the English language. Do you think some day
`probly' will be considered standard and `probably' obsolete? If there are
some who economize on letters, there are others who splurge. The word for
this phenomenon is called dittography. This week we'll see a few more words
about words.