Language Log

Sent in by Molshri Ezekiel via David Donnell:

Alex Baumans asks, "Could this be a Cupertino?" Liz Rafferty, "Oops! Zooey Deschanel Captioned as Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect", TV Guide 4/21/2013: Who's that girl? It's … the Boston Marathon bomber? During the intense lockdown and manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects Friday, a local Fox affiliate in Dallas, Texas misidentified one of the […]

About seven years ago, in March 2006, I wrote a Language Log post about "the Cupertino effect," a term to describe spellchecker-aided "miscorrections" that might turn, say, Pakistan's Muttahida Quami Movement into the Muttonhead Quail Movement. It owes its name to European Union translators who had noticed the word cooperation getting replaced with Cupertino by a spellchecker that […]

From reader JD in Montreal:

Earlier today, AFP photographer Alex Ogle posted on Twitter what looked like an outrageous typo in a column by Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post: the name of Benedict Cumberbatch, star of the BBC/PBS show Sherlock, got transmogrified into "Bandersnatch Cummerbund" on second mention.

A correction from The New York Times on Damon Darlin's article, "Economic Theory Plots a Course for Good Food" (4/10/12 online, p. D3 in the 4/11/12 print edition): This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: April 10, 2012 An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the Ethiopian dish doro […]

Reader JH's wife texted from the playground She's so tired though… may come home Zionist This was not an example of the role of fatigue in political identity formation, but rather a cupertino, created when her iPhone helpfully corrected (some spelling of) "soonest" to "Zionist". SMS messaging and cellphone email must be a rich source […]

'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' —'definitely'. I don't know why," says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser. So reports CNews in Canada here. But I think what they meant was that Professor Budra (who is talking about the disastrous state of the spelling and […]

Noted by John McIntyre, from "Eastern University demolishes nearly century-old log cabin", The Daily Local News (Chester County, PA), 12/26/2009:

When I was interviewed for Spiegel Online earlier this week about the dastardly Cupertino effect, I was asked if I thought spellchecker-enabled miscorrections would eventually vanish as spellchecking technology becomes more accurate in predicting potential errors. I said I thought Cupertinos would continue to be with us in one form or another, in large part […]

Spiegel Online, Germany's biggest news website and a sister publication of the weekly Der Spiegel, has just run an article on one of our favorite topics: the Cupertino effect, the phenomenon whereby automated spellcheckers miscorrect words and inattentive users accept those miscorrections. (See my primer on OUPblog as well as our ongoing coverage on both […]

Will nothing stop the wanton destruction of the Cupertino Effect? The latest victims of exuberant spellchecking are high school students in Middletown, Pennsylvania. According to reports by the Newhouse News Service and the Associated Press, the newly published yearbook of Middletown Area High School contains the following student names: Max Supernova Kathy Airbag Alexandria Impolite […]

Yesterday, Stefan Valdimarsson wrote to tell me about an interesting error in one of my recent posts. It was a typing error, but not one of the common slips of the finger that have been catalogued, counted and modeled over the decades, from D.D. Lessenberry's 1928 "Analysis of Errors" (published by Corona Typewriters, and reprinted […]