I feel a little badly about poking fun; though not about the "DOF" usage - that does show a genuine lack of understanding of the term.
None of us is immune to mistokes.
used to be a good speller though.
Speliing is less important than woolly concepts, IMO. The language keeps changing anyway, getting its corners rounded off. "Lense" is in the dictionary as a perfectly good alternative, for example - and compariing it against other words, "lens" might even be the version that looks more odd. It is just the established convention to use one rather than the other.
We may be judged by how well we accommodate ourselves to the prevailing fashion and standard usage. Often this is unfair; but at the same time, it may be a pointer that a person is not immersed in the available sources of knowledge - has not often seen the word correctly written down.
Sometimes people determinedly spell words the way they think they
should be written, and if enough people do that the same, then with time, that
becomes how they
are written or pronounced.
The same happens with ideas and terms, but because this is not all centrally planned, it can lead to absurdities. Consider the English word / concept "cloven" - as in, the foot of a goat that exists as two touching halves. This has back-constructed to two different but identically-spelt verbs, with opposed significance:
"to cleave": for two things to come together as closely fitting surfaces - my dry tongue clove to the roof of my mouth;
"to cleave": for one thing to split apart into two exactly fitting halves - the firewood clove easily under the sharp axe.
RP
