Turrents - Laugh or cry, this typo is here to stay

If I said "turrent" to you, you could probably guess that I was actually referring to "turret" which in WoW we're usually talking about a mounted gun that's shooting at you and killing you. I had to dig around on Wowhead to find some pics.


This pic is of the turrets in Iron Maidens, courtesy of Ashleah at The Misty Teahouse.
I've been laughing for the last few weeks because Hwired, who always has such an amusing way with words, says "Turrents" when we're doing Iron Maidens. It's not his only word salad. Hwired also likes saying "shaman" as "Shar-maaaarn" (whereas we either say it as shar-men or shay-men") with a drawl on the "man" part of the word.  It puts the officers in hysterics (Hwired is also responsible for mixing up our agility melee - WW Nok and Enh shaman Sars and calling them "Sock") and fortunately he is good natured about it or he'd be a crybaby as we adopt his ridiculous words as gospel.  It may not be so ridiculous, or perhaps it's a DK thing, because our other DK, Duckalot, also yells out "turrents".

Una and Luxy are grammatically correct people (Luxy and Mctacky went around capitalising all my names in the guild notes because I had them all starting with lower case), and so I would whisper TURRENT to Una to get her fired up. I said that I was going to start saying "DETURRENCE" to the hunters and see if anyone noticed my grammatical error.

But turrent is not a new typo.  In fact, people have been saying it wrong for ages.

If you go to Urban dictionary (always an amusing sources of definitions) you will find this:
"A common misspelling of the word "turret," usually made by people with a fourth-grade education." 
"A prominent typo of "turrets" in many games, particularly Infantry."
I was talking to a friend on battlenet, whom I have always admired for his verboseness and masterful use of the English language, and even he said "turrent" (when talking about Iron Maidens) which put me into gales of laughter, even after he corrected himself in the next tell. He was sad because one typo and I'll be teasing him about it for 50 years... talk about an exaggeration.  I will only tease him about it for 5 years.  But, as you can see, it's a common mistake and it makes you wonder if the mistake is repeated often enough, how long will it be before the word becomes a real word. Or maybe these words are neologisms, or "newly coined words/terms/phrases".

Examples of words used in game that are neologisms or sniglets (words which should be in the dictionary) include:

  • selfie
  • every texting abbreviation eg. LMAO, LOL, ROFL, OMG
  • noob, newb or newbie
  • griefer
  • unlike (which in the dictionary refers to something being dissimilar "that is so unlike him to do that", but in the days of social media it means that you remove a post/tweet/picture from being liked or removing the thumbs up that you gave it)
So what do you think - turrent, should it be adopted as a an alternative word for turret or should we continue correcting people?  Or do you think that continued misuse of it will make it into a real word?

Comments

  1. Pretty sure LOL, YOLO, Selfie etc have been added to the dictionary....Oxford style....god help us....

    IT IS TURRET!!!!!!!! Same as Onion is NOT ognion...gahhhhhhhhh

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  2. I know it's turret. My tongue slips more come from having to call a million things out whilst also having to focus on my own rotation. But I have heard Shaman pronounced both ways.

    - Hwired

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    1. You mean 3 ways right? Sharmen, shaymen and shar-marn... that's ok at least we know what you mean.

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  3. My husband calls them turrents. He calls the Bordeaux flavor of See's candies boudreax, and a chest of drawers a chester drawers. He's so cute, I can't correct him :D

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    1. Lol almost as cute as if your toddler was saying it right?

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  4. Sounds to me like a mix of "turret" and "torrent". In case of Iron Maidens, this additional meaning makes sense as these cannons just won't stop shooting and wiping the raid xD

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    Replies
    1. Never thought of it that way but you may be right!

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