First, you would have been wrong. It is spelled "fluctuate."
With that out of the way, here is what might have happened if you've ever been thrown off by this seemingly common misspelling:
You might first have tried to type "fluxuate" into your word processing program, only to discover that it is spelled wrong.
With no help from the spell check suggestions, you might then have typed "fluxuate" into your google search bar with the hopes of being saved by the ever-helpful "did you mean..." correction function.
Instead, you might have discovered, high on your list of search results, a blog by the name of Spooks By Me. Specifically, a post from February 27, 2007 titled "Today, I tried to spell fluctuate as "fluxuate."
The post itself has nothing to do with the word or the spelling of the word fluctuate, but it seems to have become a bit of a phenomenon. The post has a whopping 178 comments, including comments from within the past few weeks (for those of you who aren't paying attention, that's over three years later)!
The surge of comments has sparked a debate over whether all these people should have gone the dictionary route rather than typing their questions into google (I vote google... c'mon, how are you supposed to use a dictionary to efficiently find the correct spelling of a word spelled f-l-u-c... if you think that it begins f-l-u-x...? Seriously.), but it has also become a useful resource with many of the comments including the correct spelling!
I don't really know what all of this means, other than that an apparently common misspelling obviously isn't getting a lot of attention if this is first thing that comes up in google. But if you are as amused by it as I am, you can check it out for yourself here.
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