The Internet can be a frustrating place, especially for former English/writing majors trying to eek out a living in a harsh trans-print journalism world where millions of our fellow netizens see nothing wrong with “trying to eek out a living.”
This gets tooth-grindingly annoying for those sensitive enough to recognize “No, you eke out a living. E. K. E. ‘Eek’ is what you yell when some gross thing makes you squirm, like a mouse in your breakfast cereal or an adult on the Internet writing ‘Drat this economy makes it hard to eek out a living’.”
If you found yourself nodding sympathetically throughout that last paragraph, you’ll definitely want to take a sneak peak (yeah) at Stealth Mountain, a Twitter account whose owner takes no stand on the eek/eke issue, but searches every new Tweet in the Twitterverse for the term “sneak peak” and sends an automatic response: “I think you mean ‘sneak peek’.” (The account appears to be software-driven.)
On the other hand, if my earlier expressed frustration made you roll your eyes and think “Somebody needs to eek or eke out a life,” you might prefer the tweeted responses to Stealth Mountain’s admonitions. (Waxy thinks they’re hilarious either way.)
The rules of etiquette decree that admonishing people for their spelling errors is rude, unless you’re that person’s teacher, editor or someone else with a professional obligation to make corrections. So it’s probably no surprise that, of all the responses to Stealth Mountain, none expressed sincere gratitude of the “Thank you kindly for correcting my mistake and driving me further down the road to self-improvement” sort.
The closest anyone came to that was @natalie_adele, who said “loll..WOAH..thank god for the correction…Otherwise no one would have known what I meant…*rolls eyes*”
Others seemed downright incredulous at receiving the out-of-nowhere correction. @FeltonsWifey asked, “really bro? Really”
OSnapItsChelsea, who got a Stealth Mountain response after linking to a newspaper story with “sneak peak” in its title, snapped, “how about you alert the author of the article and not me, annoying spelling nazi robot.”
Wanderon1 was even more annoyed and fired off three responses in quick succession:
“You made this WHOLE account just to correct people that say “sneak peak” seriously, who cares about a letter?”
“SNEAAAAAK PEAAAAAAAAAK UMAD NOW?”
“For retards like @StealthMountain WHY DONT YOU JOIN THE GRAMMAR POLICE YOU IDIOT”
Heather, who tweets as @h3ffa, seemed particularly shocked by the timing: “who the chuff are you? The spelling correction police! And working on Christmas Day as well….”
But of course working all through Christmas (and New Year’s, too) proved no problem for Stealth Mountain.