I’m reading a book where they typed in ‘tackless’ when they meant the word ‘tactless’. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this mix up. The surprising part is that publishers and writers have book editors, proofreaders (professional and non-professional). Why didn’t someone catch this?
From checking my dictionary I can’t even find tackless as a word. So it should have come up on their spellcheck just as it is on mine right now. Tactless, however is clean.
I like the book I’m reading. I’ve already bought the next one in the series and I’m taking it with me for the weekend of babysitting. But, I am going to send the writer a note about her word usage. We are writers, word people. We need to get the words right. When we don’t then we need to get help from other word people. There are a lot of words, each of us can’t know all of them ourselves.
Now I just need to be tactful when I write to her.