Not Washed or Cooked, # 141

Dr Faustus spotted this:

Link: The Guardian, ‘American doctor shot dead in Pakistan in suspected secretarian attack’

The subheading shows that the word required is sectarian, but how did the error arise? OED confirms that secretarian (equivalent to secretarial) exists, but it hasn’t been used since the early 1800s, and it is flagged as an error by WordPerfect and Word, rejected by the Blogger (Google) spellchecker, and automatically changed by Google search to sectarian.

Oddly, the URL for the page shows the correct word, not the mangle —

— which begs the question of why no-one bothered flagging and rectifying the error; but a week later the headline remains uncorrected.

Secretarian for sectarian