Internet culture spells doom for strait-laced orthographers:
According to the Oxford English Corpus, a database of a billion words, dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English.“Straight-laced” is used 66% of the time even though it should be written “strait-laced”, according to lexicographers working for Oxford Dictionaries, who record the way English is spoken and written by monitoring books, television, radio and newspapers and, increasingly, websites and blogs.
“Just desserts” is used 58% of the time instead of the correct spelling, “just deserts” (desert is a variation of deserve), while 59% of all written examples of the phrase in the Corpus call it a “font of knowledge or wisdom” when it should be “fount”.
It has become so widely used that the wrong version is now included in Oxford dictionaries alongside the right one.
Other mistakes fast becoming the received spelling include substituting “free reign” for the correct phrase, “free rein”.
The original refers to letting a horse loose, but many use “reign” and assume the expression means to allow a free rule.
Other examples of common mistakes include “slight of hand” instead of “sleight”, “phased by” when it should be “fazed by”, “butt naked” instead of the correct “buck naked” and “vocal chords” for “vocal cords.”