I can see how some language changes come about. For example ‘croissant’ is the French for ‘crescent’, but in English it only has the sense of a crescent-shaped pastry. I have now started to hear people asking for a ‘chocolate croissant’ meaning a ‘pain au chocolat’, which is rectangular. In English, ‘croissant’ therefore appears to be in the process of calving from its mother iceberg of ‘crescent.

‘Brand new’ was originally ‘bran new’, and ‘rule the roost’ was originally ‘rule the roast’. No doubt people originally rued the incorrect usages that are now accepted.

There is probably a well-worn path of (a) correct usage (b) some variant creeps in and annoys people (c) it sticks and is used more widely (d) descriptive rather than prescriptive dictionaries (which should they be?) start referring to it (e) the variant becomes correct.

I’ve never heard anyone refer to a firework as a squib these days, which (Mark) is not the same as saying there aren’t any fireworks any more.

Most of the results for “high gudgeon” are either explicit puns about fish or references to gudgeon pins. The number of genuine mistakes is vanishingly small.

Perhaps it would be a good idea for you to run all your examples through Google again using quotation marks, and filter out the false positives.

Yes, you are absolutely right about the quotaion marks, Mark.

But this is just one case out of hundreds. Here’s one I came across recently: try Googling “high gudgeon” versus “high dudgeon”.

J – and no, most people don’t know what a squib is. You are in a fortunate minority.