> Phillip Hallam-Baker
Funny how the misspelling of a double consonant comes from someone who has a misspelt given name with an extra double consonant!
Funny how the misspelling of a double consonant comes from someone who has a misspelt given name with an extra double consonant!
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 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".
Edit: I'm glad you made this comment. I only know people with the name "Phillip" but I constantly find myself double-checking how their name is spelt before I refer to them (in text). I chalked it up to me being a bad friend but I guess it doesn't help that I might be seeing enough of the "Philip" variation to get confused.