There will be no spooky mysteries

Occasionally in my perusal of online content, I encounter a new error, a mistake I haven't seen before. And deep down in my grammatical gut, I know Something Bad is happening.

Such was the case this week, when I read a user-generated movie review that referred to a parodic film as "a spook of" another film.

A simple slip of the fingers? Not necessarily; hurried typing might produce "spoor" or "spood" or "spoog," but the "k" is on the other side of the keyboard.

Fearing the worst, I did a Google search on "a spook of." Among references to ghostly apparitions and CIA spies were the following frightening results:



What to make of this ghastly phenomenon? Is the word spoof falling out of use, rendering it essentially invisible? Are people reading less, so their exposure to the correct word is minimized? Or am I so out of touch with popular culture that I haven't noticed that The Kids are now using this phrase quite legitimately to refer to lampoons, parodies and pastiches?

Whichever it is, it scares me.

Copyeditor General's ruling: Stop scaring me.