Snester (say what??)

While I was proof reading my latest work, I stumbled upon this word: snester. WHAT??

I seldom miss typographical errors while I'm writing thanks to the technology that points out errors immediately. Even after I've finished, I generally don't find more than three or four typos in the entire manuscript (not misuses, typos). So when I was reading and ran into this word, I was dumbfounded. What the heck was that word supposed to be? The obvious answer came to me after only a few short minutes.

It brought to mind a published book I read that had a similarly odd word. I spent way too much time looking for the post I wrote about that word, but it didn't take long to figure out that the author in that instance had replaced the word tuna in her manuscript. Instead of searching for the whole word tuna, she did a global replace, which inserted the substitute into the word for-tuna-tely, which turned it into something else entirely (which word escapes me at the moment). One would hope these types of things would jump out BEFORE publication.

paper wasp nest

Which brings me back to snester. I'd written about bees and wasps and hives, and one of my critique partners pointed out that wasps build nests, not hives. He was right, of course, so I did a search and replace for hive and replaced it with nest. And I forgot to enable "search for whole word only." The mystery word? S-hive-r. The plus side to my boo-boo was that I discovered that I'd overused the word shiver!

Aside from giving me a good laugh while I was proofreading, goofy made-up words are a good reminder to be careful when you do a search and replace! Check that little box that says "search for whole word only" or watch for "match case" in those instance where capitalization applies, as well.