> Every time I have to type it I die a little inside.
I rarely spell it "properly" on the first attempt. My brain just auto-corrects it as I type. I try to think of it as an inside joke or something, but - as you can see from my previous comment - it doesn't stop me from being snarky about it.
>If that's how people start spelling the word, then that is how the word is spelled.
I quite agree. Unfortunately, there aren't any people that spell the word with three Rs, only HTTP parsers, and I draw the line at bending my conception of language to the will of inanimate agents, as inevitable as this may turn out to be.
>but even so, who cares?
Let's make a deal, I'll stop being irrationally emotional about spelling when everyone else stops being irrationally emotional about brace placement. Cool? ;)
This isn't a bunch of schoolchildren inventing new words or some literary movement to change the spelling of a class of words. This is one mistake by a dude who wrote something years ago that now everyone has to duplicate. It is a terrible example of "living language".
Is it? When I'm writing about somebody who refers another person somewhere, I use "referrer." When I write about HTTP headers, I use "referer," even outside of code (i.e. in chat or prose). They're distinct concepts that now have distinct (but homophonic) words.
It isn't even an americanism, its a straight-up misspelling.
Every time I have to type it I die a little inside.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referrer#Origin_of_the_ter...