Foreign Language

If I've been incommunicado, it's because I am once again playing The Sims 3. There's a new expansion pack, World Adventures, which allows you to travel to France, Egypt, and China. You can explore tombs in all three countries: I guess the tombs in France are like the caves at Lascaux, I wouldn't know, I haven't been there yet, I've only gotten to Egypt.

In the screen shot below, my Sims have been poking around in the basement of a pyramid, and one of them has formulated the desire to find a hidden door. And look! A typo in the wild!

I've spotted typos in The Sims before: here's one in The Sims 3, and one in its predecessor. This one is new, and new to me, too.

"Tombs and catacombs are writhe with secret doors and passageways."

So some writer heard the word "rife" once, didn't know what to make of it, and rendered it as "writhe" instead, which is ridiculous, shouldn't have happened, and ought to have been caught by an editor. Or, worse, some editor changed it from the correct word to an incorrect one. I don't even know what to say about that possibility.

"Rife", by the way, isn't related to or descended from anything else, it would seem; it's just a word that means what it means, which is to say "laden [with]: abounding [in]". "Writhe", on the other hand, is--and this is very predictable--from Old Norse, from a word that means just what you would think it means: "to twist".