As an eager young reporter, fresh out of journalism school, I once described to readers the “blazen colours of fall” in a feature article celebrating the changing of the seasons.

‘Blazen’ certainly sounded like the appropriate word to these ears, a bold melding of ‘brazen’ and ‘blaze’ that nicely conjured visions of leafy trees lit up in brilliant hues of red and yellow.

I thought so, anyway.

The word – as I soon learned, courtesy of a widely grinning colleague who, if I remember correctly, was waving the article high over her head with a dramatic flourish - did not exist.

It still doesn't, though I am applying to have it included as a new entry in the next edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Bungled Words and Phrases That Made It Into Print and Caused My Face to Turn a Deep Shade of Red.

Mistakes happen to everyone, but when they happen in a newspaper column, there is no hiding them.

Accidentally drop a vowel or misplace a verb and suddenly a decently crafted sentence becomes a clanging jumble of words that will stop a reader dead, and cause the writer to age three years and possibly suffer a life-threatening arrhythmia.

As evidence, I now point you to last week's column, where I wrote about "pumping my first in the air," when, of course, I meant to write "pumping my fist in the air."

A co-worker alerted me to the gaffe on the day it was published.

"Why were you pumping your first in the air?" she called out from across the office.

"My what?"

"It says here you were pumping your first in the air."

"That doesn't make sense," I said, grabbing a copy of the paper and flipping to the sentence in question, with its dunderheaded misspelling glaring as brightly as a Broadway marquee at night.

(Note to editor: please check the spelling of "misspelling" to make sure I didn't misspell it. Thanx.)

I also flubbed a line about women spewing steam from their ears, mistakenly writing "spewing steaming from their ears," and leaving you, the reader, to wonder what steaming substance it was the women were spewing from their ears.

When a bum word finds its way into a column, my natural inclination is to run to the dictionary to see if the word A) exists in the English language, or B) has some obscure alternate meaning that somehow fits the gist of the sentence.

On that note, I once referred to an Internet magnate – someone who made a pile of money investing in the World Wide Web – as an Internet magnet, causing a letter writer to wonder about my ‘attraction’ to the high-tech billionaire.

The important point to note here is that the blunders-per-square-inch are fewer than the number of correct words, according to the spell-check feature on my computer.

They had better be, otherwise my face may turn blazen with embarrassment.