Language Lessons: Defuse vs. Diffuse

This is one in a series of posts about the peculiarities of writing and speaking the English language. For similar posts, click here.

Notice the error yet? The title of this blog post gives it away.

See here for the difference between defuse and diffuse.

It's a common enough error that the first example I found was a newspaper headline from today: Thompson to diffuse [read 'defuse'] IEDs in Afghanistan. In this article, "All four of the officers received awards for their actions to diffuse [read 'defuse'] a bomb threat on the ferry."