Of monsters and malaprops

I recently encountered a delightful malapropism in an article I read online:

Greene’s final text of his so-called Catholic teratology

Given that DiCamillo lists four books after this, I’m pretty sure the word he was reaching for was “tetralogy” and his spellchecker did him wrong giving him instead a word that means:

1 Medicine Biology the scientific study of congenital abnormalities and abnormal formations: he has made a long study of teratology | [count noun] : the teratologies of human corruption figurative.

2 mythology relating to fantastic creatures and monsters.

but of course his mistake revealed a new word for me which is always something I enjoy. I kind of wonder whether there’s some term for this sort of spellchecker-blessed wrong word choice. Another case that springs to mind came up in my ex-wife’s master’s thesis where she used beneficiate where she meant to use benefit as a verb, the sort of erroneous backformation that would come from an ESL speaker¹ coming from a romance language where beneficiar or its cognates would be a valid word.

Spell checkers have gotten good enough to be able to catch the common confusions of there/their/they’re and to/too/two although there are some cases where even an English proofreader might be challenged to determine the correct choice (e.g., “Does he want to?” “Does he want too?” “Does he want two?” can all be valid depending on the context).

I have to admit that I occasionally fall victim to the laziness of letting the spellchecker/autocomplete help me with picking a word, particularly when I’m not writing in English which is the place where the danger is at it’s highest. This sort of writing error is a hard one to avoid as it requires knowing what you don’t know.² This is part of why I’m reluctant to reach for the thesaurus to find a word.³ 

1. She was a Mexican writing in English for a program in Belgium. 
2. As someone who has gained  much of his vocabulary from reading, I’m particularly prone to incorrect pronunciation. In just the last few months I’ve learned I’ve been mispronouncing “ague” and “redolent” all my life.
3. When I do, it’s not to find a word I don’t know but to help my brain find a word I know but can’t pull out of the depths of my aging brain.