Comment by ketralnis
7 years ago
I don't think you can ever describe a person's name as spelled correctly or incorrectly. It's spelled how they spell it. It's their name, not a dictionary's. Variations in spelling are perfectly natural and for names in particular are incredibly common
I'm not "attacking" their parents who chose the name or anything like that, and any spelling is fine for a name, but there is a clear etymology to the name "Philip" that comes from "philos" and "hippos", someone who loves horses, and an indisputably historically correct way to spell it.
That a misspelling has become particularly common (or like for my own name, much more common than the historically correct spelling) doesn't make it anymore correctly spelt than "referer" in my opinion.
But if you disagree with the term "misspelling", I can formulate it another way: let's say that it's funny how the creative modern spelling "referer" instead of the historical "referrer" comes from someone who has a creatively spelt name "Phillip" where "Philip" was historically more common, and that both differ from the historical spelling on a double consonant. It's a much more awkward sentence though for such a trivial, passing remark.
I think it's being argued that describing a name variation as a "misspelling" -- as in, a mistake -- is incorrect. What does the etymology or historical popularity of "Philip" have to do with it? We don't know that he has that name because he truly loves horses or because his parents attempted to honor a king of Macedonia.
I know this is treading into the classic prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistic debate, but the reason why we can call "referer" a misspelling -- rather than a creative decision - is because the original authors seem to admit that it was unintentional. Fewer folks would be calling it a misspelling if the authors had meant to do it, e.g. to avoid a name collision with some other attribute named "referrer" or to honor a colleague named "Referer".
Or how their parents spelt it.