Greenhorn

Sometimes your brain selects a word and your fingers start to type it, but they have a mind of their own, you know, and so they start the word out correctly but by the end are typing something rather different, which happens to all of us, but a spellchecker won't catch it because it's a legitimate word, and if you don't have a proofreader or a copy editor, you're kind of boned.

Here's a couple sentences from this soft-news story about designer Alexander McQueen and some line of makeup he has:

Options for armchair fashion followers? Eye shadow in Nile, a royal blue; Pagan, a yellow lime green; and Haunting, a seafood green.

"Seafood green". Yeah, right. The writer meant to say "seafoam green", obviously. (It's a light pastel green, slightly blue-greyed, not unlike celadon or moss green.)

I know these things happen to writers: I make that kind of mistake myself all the time. And then I correct it. I don't understand how such things make their way into professionally published writing.