Here’s a neat bi-lingual typo to chew on: “confude” as the common result of unrelated errors in English and Spanish.

Inspiration from a mefi comment by user ornate insect:

“there is indeed a confuding and implicit tautology there”

Confuding!  What a wonderful little typo — and I think in this case I can safely declare it to be a typo and a typo only — an easy slip of the finger from the ’s’ to the ‘d’ key, and no obvious-to-me word for which it would likely be a mis-analysis.

There are about 1300 google hits right now for “confuding“, and another ~2400 for “confuded“.  That’s vs. ~38million and ~169million for “confusing” and “confused”, respectively.  The d-variants represent a tiny fraction by comparison.

What I like so much about “confuding” is the feel it has of being just maybe some bit of rhetorical jargon after all, some strange middle child between “confusing” and “conflating”, a cousin to “concluding” on one side of the family tree and “occluding” on the other, perhaps.  As not-quite-words go, it’s arguably confuding to behold.

There are, too, ~8000 hits for “confude“, though many are for Spanish-language sites.  But at a portion of 8000 hits, ‘confude’ looks like an error too.  And a little babelfishing (my Spanish is pretty much non-existent) and some context-checking suggests “confunde” as the well-formed version.

So: a miskey in English, and a missed key in Spanish.  (If I’m wrong in my conjecture about the latter, let me know; no hablas.)