Peekaboo

I use a tabbed browser, and it's a wonderful thing. If I go to a page with a lot of links on it, and I often do, I can open every one of those links in a new tab without leaving the page I'm on. Then I can read those pages at my leisure, knowing they'll hang around as long as the main window does. I go to Salon.com and open eight or ten windows, to Slate.com and open another half-dozen, to Onion.com and grab another fifteen, and so on: I might have thirty or forty tabs going by the time I'm finished.

I'm telling you this to explain why what currently annoys me is something that appeared almost a week ago, on Salon.com on March 28th: because I've only just gotten around to reading it. The piece (it's here if you want to read it) contains this aggravating error:

"Some gun law experts say the Bush administration has shown a remarkable willingness to push the edge of the civil liberties envelope, citing the necessities of war -- the "sneak and peak" provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and the naming of U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants" being prime examples."

"Sneak and peak"? Argh!

To peak is to reach a maximum. To peek is to take a quick glimpse. They're unrelated, and even a cursory copy-edit will nab such an error. (I suppose it could have been worse: the writer could have said "sneak and pique".) Every day I wish more and more that spell-checkers had never been invented, or that grammar checkers had been perfected.