Watch out for "changing morays"

Many blogs this week featured the story about Parisians considering lifting a ban on women wearing trousers. But I don't think anyone noticed this paragraph in the Telegraph (which after four days still hasn't been corrected):

The latest attempt to remove the outmoded rule was in 2003, when a Right-wing MP from President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party wrote to the minister in charge of gender equality. The minister's response was: "Disuse is sometimes more efficient than (state) intervention in adapting the law to changing morays."

It's clearly a simple homophone switch, but where did the error arise?  I would doubt that a spell-checker would make that substitution.

 While we're on the subject of language, enjoy these tidbits from the World Wide Words website:

• Bob Lee read about a malevolent natural event in the issue of the Calgary Herald for 23 April. A report noted that Princess Alexandra was unable to attend an event in the city: “After more than a year of meticulous preparations, the volcano in Iceland disrupted air travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers, including the princess.”

• He spotted another in a story in the same issue about an update of what was once called the badger game: “A man hired a female escort online. After she arrived, she received a phone call from a friend, police said. Within minutes, two men burst inside the home.” That must have been really messy.

• Norman C Berns found a link in the Huffington Post to a story from the Daily Telegraph last Tuesday: “A touch of Mission: Impossible has come to text messaging, with the launch of a new service called Safe Text. The system sends messages to mobile phones that self-destruct as soon as they have been read.” Mr Berns would prefer to keep his phone intact.