Language Log

Local radio station WFCR on Thursday, October 11 started a report with a sentence that gave me a big double-take:

“The wife and mother of two men killed in a fire in Northampton has filed suit …”

And the next morning, October 12, I saw almost the same words in the local paper, the Hampshire Gazette:

Photo caption:

Alleged arsonist Anthony Baye has been sued by Elaine Yeskie, the widow and mother of the two men killed in a Northampton house fire he allegedly set.

Beginning of story:

The widow and mother of men killed in a house fire in 2009 filed a wrongful death lawsuit Wednesday against alleged fire-starter Anthony P. Baye. Elaine Yeskie, 77, is seeking monetary and punitive damages against Baye, …

The version under the photo caption makes the description an appositive phrase, so we already know that it’s a description of one person. But the beginning of the radio story really took me by surprise and made me grab my pen. I feel subjectively sure, though I could of course be wrong, that I could never say that that way. All the ways I could express it take more words; about the shortest acceptable version I can find is “The wife of one and mother of the other of two men killed in a fire …”

A new book by Jeffrey Toobin, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, is published today. It opens with a prologue telling the story of the Obama inaugural oath flub, first told on Language Log in Ben Zimmer's piece "Adverbial placement in the oath flub" and the follow-up a day later in "Rectifying the oath flub." Toobin reveals two bits of information that I was not aware of. First, a complete script of the oath, showing exactly where the breaks would come so that Obama would know when to do his repetitions, was sent to Obama's staff as a PDF but never reached the president or anyone close to him, so when Chief Justice Roberts stood facing him to administer the oath, there was a script that Obama had not seen, but neither of the two men knew that. Second, although Roberts had worked over that script, he chose to rely on his famously prodigious memory: he waved away the card that was offered to him with the script on it, and the chance to do a rehearsal: "That's OK, I know the oath," he said. And thus it was that when two men met to perform their extraordinarily important ritual, they were both without scripts and had never rehearsed together. The rest is history.

Since the death of Neil Armstrong on Saturday, many remembrances have told the story about his famously flubbed first words on the moon. From Ian Crouch on The New Yorker's News Desk blog:

When the lunar module, named the Eagle, touched down, following moments of radio silence that terrified the folks back in mission control, he relayed: “Houston: Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Later, as he made his way out of the lunar module (or LM), he described his progress in banal terms that, because of where they were coming from and what they conveyed, rose to the level of magic: “I’m going to step off the LM now.” And then he issued what is among the most famous proclamations of the last century—a jubilant counterbalance to F.D.R.’s “Day of Infamy” speech and a capstone to J.F.K.’s declaration that “we choose to go to the moon”—a statement that Armstrong had composed and prepared just hours earlier, in between the more pressing business of operating space equipment, according to Armstrong’s biographer, James Hansen: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Introducing Paul Ryan as his running mate this morning, Mitt Romney made a gaffe that was remarkably similar to one that Barack Obama made four years ago when he introduced Joe Biden as his running mate.

"Let's have lunch at that café — you know the one . . . Aquamarine," said my friend. And realized immediately, before even getting to the end of the word, that the café was not called anything like that. There is no Aquamarine café in Edinburgh. The one I rapidly guessed my friend was alluding to is a very nice Turkish place on Nicholson Street, and it's called Turquaz (their sign says "TurQuaz"). What the hell was going on with that crazy error? A random brainslip?

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On the heels of the notorious Nooking of War and Peace, Shane Horan sends along "a priceless search-and-replace error on the rules page of an Irish secondary school." St. Joseph's College in Borrisoleigh, County Tipperary has an entire section on "personal electronic deDeputys": though "mobile phones and other electronic deDeputys can be very useful and helpful," the school's rules say "these deDeputys may not be powered on while the student is on the school grounds, including before classes begins or at break or lunch time."

Another example of e-publishing string-replacement gone wrong, from the Kindle edition of Ed McBain's Blood Relatives, originally published in 1975:

Here on Language Log we've often talked about unfortunate search-and-replace miscorrections, which now seem to be infecting poorly edited e-reader texts. The latest example, via Kendra Albert on Jonathan Zittrain's Future of the Internet blog, is a doozy. The Nook edition of Tolstoy's War and Peace (in its English translation) has been de-Kindled, quite literally. Every instance of the text string kindle has been replaced by Nook.

(Click to embiggen.)

Making the rounds today, from Andrew Bloch's Twitter feed:

Bloch's comment: "Reuters applies foreign exchange rate to 50 Cent. He is now known as RM1.50 in Malaysia."

Steve Kass found this curious expression in the nutrition facts (where "Saturated Fat" usually is) on a package of imported-from-Taiwan crackers at his local Chinese grocery, Jīnmén 金门 ("Golden Gate"; Quemoy [Hokkien Kim-mûi]) in East Hanover, New Jersey. Here is a picture of the label:

Scans of the front and back of the package are shown below.

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 wot as door wot. Additionally, the article referred incorrectly to awaze tibs as aware ties.

As noted on the Slate Twitter feed, these goofs are almost certainly the result of overzealous autocorrect — or, as we say in these parts, they're due to the Cupertino effect. We've documented many such cupertinos over the years (old site, new site). Foreign food terms have cropped up before — way back in 2005, before we even knew the Cupertino effect had a name, I noted that menus and recipes had fallen prey to the unfortunate spellcheck miscorrection of prostitute for prosciutto. At least prosciutto is likely to be in spellcheck dictionaries these days — the same can't be said for Ethiopian doro wot or awaze tibs, no matter how delectable those dishes may be.

(Craig Silverman of Poynter's Regret the Error is also on the case.)

As I read the Daily Mail article referred to in my previous post, my eye drifted down into the comments, and I saw that a commenter in London signing himself as JustSomeBloke had said this:

Time and time again, it has been shown that the school's league tables are routinely fiddled in order to benefit this or that school. At the same time, our so-called education system — ruined by lefty, progressive teaching methods — can barely teach our children to write English properly. If your a younger reader, you probably didn't even notice the two deliberate mistakes in this comment.

Well, I am not a younger reader; I have 40 years of involvement in academic work on the English language. But I have to confess to you that it took a couple of readings before I spotted both errors. The second was immediately noticeable, but I had to go back and look again to identify the first, which I had casually read past.