Your comment peaked my interest to read the HBR article you mentioned. Thanks. http://hbr.org/2010/07/the-big-idea-no-management-is-not-a-p...

No, it piqued your interest.

Is there a name for that phenomenon, where people hear terms in use but map them to the wrong words? Or the opposite, where people learn words through reading but mispronounce them?

Linguists call them real-word errors. They're very common in writing and spell checkers do nothing to protect against them.

I work on a free browser extension called After the Deadline. It picks a lot of this stuff up. It didn't pick up this particular example, next time I deploy an update to our service it will.

You may want to check it out, it works here on HN too: http://www.afterthedeadline.com

(as a note, I tend to make the same types of errors)

Actually I suspect that spelling checkers have made them more common. I know I see them a lot more often on the Web, and have been seeing them increasingly frequently over the last few years.

There are a few mild forms of dyxleia that cover thoses symptoms. For example, I cannot "sound out" words. I have to hear them before I say them. Makes for some funny times, thank god I have a great memory, or I'd look stupid all the time

I submitted a Wikipedia article on this very subject :-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477763

Apologies in advance for engaging in the clichéd 'submit a Wikipedia page' pattern!

malapropism

or "eggcorn", if the substituted term makes some kind of sense in context.

Malapropism.

Thanks for core wrecking my miss take :p

Using the internet it's possible to verify a doctor's job(assuming access to medical charts and lab results).

I think the thing that separates licensed professions from unlicensed ones , is usually issues of safety,i.e. when the price of an error is just too expensive.

So truck drivers(which is a pretty easy to verify job - are goods delivered ? ) are licensed, and have a conduct code("sleep every X hours" , speed limits ) , and computer maintenance technicians aren't, even thought it's more complex to verify their job(are updates installed ? is the computer secure ? ).

> Can someone check the quality of what they receive from a developer without being a developer?

That's the QA team right there. And the ones I work with are very good at it!