A few months ago I found myself living one of my milder visions of hell, trapped on a flight to Los Angeles, having forgotten to bring along anything to read but Physical Review Letters. Finishing the two articles that had inspired me to stuff it in my briefcase before we even reached the Mississippi I decided to make the best of a bad thing by taking the opportunity to expand my horizons. Scanning the table of contents, I was arrested by a title containing the word “Lagrangean.”

Funny, I thought, it's not often you see misprints so blatantly displayed. But when I turned to the article, there it was again, “Lagrangean,” in the title and scattered through the text. Well, I thought, an uncharacteristic failure of the copyediting process. The authors were foreign and apparently didn't know how to spell. Copy editors aren't physicists, the word is surely in few if any dictionaries, and so it slipped through.

But I had nagging doubts. Easily resolved, I thought: You can't write an article in theoretical particle physics without a Lagrangian, so I can check it right now. Well, it turns out to be not quite that easy. To be sure, you can't do particle physics without a Lagrangian, but you don't have to call it anything more than L, and many don't. Nevertheless, I found a Lagrangian, fully denominated, in one more article, and there it was, shimmering derisively before my eyes again: “Lagrangean.”

Now I am not a man of great self-confidence, and my secretary will testify that I am a rotten speller. Was I fooling myself? Could “Lagrangean” be right, and my conviction that it should be “Lagrangian” an orthographic hallucination induced by the absence of better things to read, like a mirage in the desert? Please ask yourself this, dear reader, before reading on: Would it have startled you?

When the plane landed in Los Angeles, I tooled up the freeway to the house of my hosts and breathlessly asked, “How do you spell ‘Lagrangian’?”

“I dunno,” said he, but she said without hesitation, “L-A-G-R-A-N-G-I-A-N,” and I felt hope for my sanity, A quick tour revealed that every book in the house on mechanics and field theory spelled it with an i. I was sane! But what was going on at Physical Review Letters?