Copy Edit du Jour

Some proofreading catches send a chill down my spine -- usually because I almost didn't catch them at all. Only on a second reading did I notice the error in this passage. Even then it felt like a fluke that I caught it. Here's the sentence:

Guests sipped signature cocktails and nibbled hors d'oeuvres into the wee
hours until the evening winded down and they went home with gift baskets teeming
with treats from local merchants.

The catch ....





















I changed "winded" to "wound."


"Winded," 99% of the time, means out of breath. The proper past tense of the verb "to wind" is "wound." Webster's New World does allow "winded" as a past tense, but calls it "rare." And in copy editing, we never opt for secondary dictionary choices, much less "rare" ones.

That was almost the one that got away.

Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

relieve stress = 1,890,000 hits
relive stress = 17,000 hits

(More fun: The first hit for "relive stress" says, "Physical contact is a great way to relive stress," and appears to be from an article that appeared in some publication of Caltech.)