In yesterday's New York Times business section, an article headlined "Coke Struggles to Keep Up with Nimble Rivals" included this sentence:
Under Mr. Isdell, Coke is now trying to be a more spritely buyer.
That adjective should be spelled sprightly. The word is an odd example of English orthography becoming more complex rather than simpler over time: the noun form is indeed sprite, from Latin spiritus, "a small supernatural being; an elf or pixie." Sprite has been around since 1303, according to The Online Etymology Dictionary. But the adjective (and it is an adjective, despite that -ly suffix) became the more Germanic-looking sprightly around 1596, and that's the only accepted spelling to this day.
And, yes, Coca-Cola does own Sprite, the lemon-lime beverage introduced in 1961 as a competitor to 7-Up, so I did wonder briefly whether there was a little in-joke going on at the Times. But the misspelling is so common that I think it just slipped past the copy desk.
As long as we're in the bottled-beverage aisle, did you notice that Coca-Cola has just acquired "Energy Brands, known as glacéau," the makers of Vitamin Water? Glacéau is a clever enough portmanteau of the French words for "ice" and "water," but the totally superfluous acute accent is a dead giveaway that no one there parlay-voos. (In fact, glacéau is headquartered in Queens.) And the lower-case "g" is going to have copy editors gritting their teeth, and reaching for bottles of the hard stuff, for years to come. As for "Energy Brands, known as..." is that like "My name is Theodore but call me Beaver"? No clue. (For more on "hyperforeignism," read the ever-acute Mr. Verb here and here.)
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