“Limited Quanities”

Devolution toward Simpler, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in a television advertisement for a business named Surplus Furniture.

Problem:
The noun is misspelled.

Explanation:
The misspelling is obvious: “Quanities” should have been “Quantities” in the big headline in the TV commercial.

What is not as obvious, perhaps, is why the misspelling occurred.

Not enunciating distinctly the first ‘t’ in “quantities” is common among many American speakers, so the misspelling could be due to the headline writer unconsciously spelling “quantities” in the way that he or she heard the noun dictated by the furniture-store owner.

I also believe that the misspelling is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It’s simpler to drop the first ‘t’ than to include it.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following spellings (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “quantities” — 50,800,000 matches
  • “quanities” — 165,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 308:1, which is a very good sign.

Solution:
“Limited Quantities”