About that dessert...

I was wholly unsatisfied with the results of the sherbet/sherbert discussion last night, probably because, as a linguist from the Midwest, English teachers and east-coast dictionary editors are my sworn enemies. (As fond as I am of Wikipedia, its claims that the word is "mistakenly" pronounced with the extra 'r' drive me up the wall.)

Anyway, I consulted the OED, which lists an occurance of 'sherbert' from 1675: "We.. were severall times treated with sherbert of lemmons." If this is a mistake, it's a very old one. I had honestly never heard the word pronounced without the second 'r', at least not before last night, so my suspicion was that it's a regional variant rather than a mistake. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English came to my rescue:

Now the name of a frozen dessert, the word sherbet appeared in English in the seventeenth century, meaning “a cold fruit drink,” and developed two spellings reflecting its two pronunciations, sherbet (SHUHR-bit) and sherbert (SHUHR-buhrt). Today both spellings and both pronunciations are regularly encountered in both British and American use, to the discomfort of some purists, who argue that only sherbet is acceptable. ...

(In case you didn't pick up on it, 'purists' is code for "stuffy old English teachers and east-coast dictionary editors". ;) )