Language Log

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 the old and new Language Log.) I was interviewed for the piece, which was written by Konrad Lischka for his column on everyday things that do not work (Fehlfunktion, or 'malfunction'). Though I don't read German, the article looks pretty solid. I especially like the German Cupertinos that are provided, based on spellchecker suggestions in German Mac Word 2008. For instance, Barack Obama prompts the suggestion Barock Obama (barock means 'baroque'), while Stinger-Rakete ('Stinger missile') prompts Stinker-Rakte ('stinker missile'). Looks like a job for the intrepid Microsoft Office Natural Language Team, Teutonic division.

The other day on NPR's "Marketplace," Robert Hass tells me, a Wall Street analyst said that Obama "has to show Americans that he is making strident progress toward stabilizing the credit crisis." A new one on me, but Google turns up about 100 hits for strident progress, 50 or so for strident advances, and almost 400 for strident growth, the great majority of them suggesting simply "great" or "impressive," with no intimation of shrillness or unpleasantness:

Today, some of the most strident advances in technology overall have been in the arena of forecasting… (CBS3, Springfield, Mass.)

Sizzler made strident progress throughout the 1980s, blossoming into a vibrant enterprise. (Worldwide Restaurant Concepts, Inc.)

The failure of real gains to trickle down the income scale has been mitigated by… a strident expansion of public sector activities and the public funding of employment within the public and private sectors. (Economic Research Council, UK)

The shares are trading on about 23 times forecast 2007 earnings, but there is no sign that Capita's strident growth is likely to slow. (The Telegraph)

Quite a few of the hits seem to be from Asian English-language  sources, but as the examples above show, the phenomenon is pretty widespread. And it goes back quite a while: a 1922 collection of items by the famous Chicago Tribune columnist Bert Leston Taylor includes the item

"SINCE her tour of the Pacific Coast," declares a Berkeley bulletin, "Miss Case has made strident advances in her art." The lady, it appears, sings.

Is this just the influence of "making strides," or is there some way to get here from the literal meaning of strident?

When Chief Justice John Roberts and Barack Obama made a hash of the presidential oath of office on Tuesday, most early commentators — including me — assumed it didn't really matter what they said, since Obama had officially become president at noon (shortly before they actually got to the oath). But some legal scholars pointed out that the oath is still required under the Constitution and argued that a "do-over" should be performed, just to be safe. Today, the do-over proponents won out, and at 7:35 pm EST, Roberts again swore in Obama in the Map Room of the White House. From the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire:

“We decided it was so much fun,” Obama joked before again stating the words written in the Constitution. “Are you ready to take the oath?” Roberts asked. “I am, and we’re going to do it very slowly,” Obama quipped.
The oath took 25 seconds, and the recitation was flawless this time. “Congratulations, again,” Roberts said. “Thank you, sir,” Obama replied.
“The bad news for the [press] pool is there’s 12 more [inaugural] balls,” Obama joked.

The "Bushisms" industry, mined so thoroughly by Slate's Jacob Weisberg for eight long years, is now a thing of the past. But Weisberg's colleague at Slate, Christopher Beam, got an exclusive scoop on a behind-the-scenes eleventh-hour Bushism when he managed to get into a farewell party for the outgoing administration on Sunday night. Here's what Bush told the crowd, according to Beam:

"I am glad we made this journey," he went on. Then he engaged in a little reminiscence. "Remember the time in 2003 when Bartlett came to work all hung over?" Laughs. "Nothing ever changes."
He continued: "We never shruck—"
"Shirked!" someone yelled.
"Shirked," Bush corrected, smiling. "You might have shirked; I shrucked. I mean we took the deals head on."

Chief Justice John Roberts' administration of the presidential oath to Barack Obama was far from smooth. Early reports differ in saying who stumbled: NBC and ABC say the flub was Roberts', while the AP says it was Obama's. I think both men were a bit nervous, and the error that emerged from their momentary disfluency came down to a problem of adverbial placement.

In the comments to my post Orwell's Liar, Beth posted a link to Joseph William's article The Phenomonology of Error, and Mark reposted the link in a follow-up post here.

Well, I just finished reading the Williams article, and what I want to know is how the fuck an article riddled with errors could ever be published in a respectable journal…

Kathryn Burlingham wrote a few days ago:

I'm thinking "withe" should be a recognized contraction [of "with the"]. Happens to me all the time. 

adding, in mail yesterday:

I can tell you it isn't just a typing phenomenon. I find it in my handwritten things all the time.

This is a type of error in writing/typing known as telescoping: a sequence of two words with some common material at their juncture (TH in this case) is produced as a single word with only one instance of the shared material. (There are more complex cases of telescoping, but this type is especially easy to understand.) And the error is indeed frequent. Searching on "withe" gets over a million raw hits, but most of them are irrelevant. Still, there are plenty of telescoped examples in there.

In its article on Google's year-end "Zeitgeist" listings of the most searched terms, BBC News reports:

The things people around the globe have in common are a strong interest in socialising and politics, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search at Google.

"Social networks compromised four out of the top ten global fastest-rising queries while the US election held everyone's interest around the globe," she wrote on Google's official blog.

I checked back on the Google Blog and what Mayer wrote was:

Social networks comprised four out of the top 10 global fastest-rising queries, while the U.S. election held everyone's interest around the globe.

So the BBC editors, besides changing 10 to ten and removing the comma before while, apparently also changed comprised to compromised. A fascinating miscorrection (or incorrection, if you prefer).

It all started with an entry in the "Sic!" section of Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter #614, on 11/22/08 (boldface added):

Rachael Weiss found an item on a menu in Turkey: "Aubergine Kebap. Ground veal patties with aborigine arranged on a layer of sauteed pita bread, topped with tomatoes and spices." She observed, "We white Australians haven't treated the original owners of our land very well, but this seems to go too far."

This is not just a simple substitution of aborigine (in the sense 'aboriginal inhabitant of Australia') for aubergine (a mostly British variant referring to the egg-shaped fruit of a plant in the genus Solanum, eaten as a vegetable, and otherwise known in English as eggplant), since the two versions occur together in this very short text. The menu writer seems to be treating the two as alternative versions of "the same word", referring to a foodstuff, perhaps along the lines of aluminium and aluminum; aboriginal inhabitants of Australia probably don't come into it at all.

The variant aborigine 'eggplant' is widespread in food writing (especially in menu items and recipes). Literally widespread, in writing about food from places from Greece and Turkey through China and Japan (these from the first hundred Google webhits on {aborigine aubergine} on 11/25/08; no doubt I've missed some cuisines in this search).  I'll give a sampling of these occurrences, and then talk about what we might make of them.

Success has many fathers, the old saying has it, and the same goes for a well-turned maxim. We've noted a number of different originators for what Jed Hartman called the Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: corrections of linguistic error are themselves inevitably prone to error. Around 1999 this truism was hit upon by no less than three independent sources: Hartman, Erin McKean, and alt.usage.english contributor Skitt. And 90 years before that, Ambrose Bierce expressed much the same sentiment. Now it appears that the law has yet another eponymous author: the mythical Mr. Muphry.

On BoingBoing, someone sent in this photo of an AT&T store in downtown Manhattan:

"Perhaps it'll be available last year," Mark Frauenfelder wryly notes. Commenters chime in with their own time-travel jokes, and a couple point out the added typo of "out stock" for "out of stock." One commenter wonders if the photo's a fake, but I'm quite sure it isn't. Substituting temporally for temporarily is a common error, perhaps due to the phonological process of haplology (the omission of one of a pair of similar sounding syllables, like saying lib'ry for library). [Or, as Andrea conjectures in the comments, it could be yet another result of the Cupertino effect.] It's so common that a quick search on Google Images and Flickr turned up a dozen more photos of signs with temporally. There are so many that it's probably just a matter of time before there's a whole blog dedicated to such signs, in the style of other peeveblogging we've seen (apostrophe abuse, unnecessary quotation marks, lowercase L, etc.). A gallery follows below.

The prime minister of Belgium, Yves Leterme, has tendered his resignation after his government failed in its attempt to grant greater autonomy to the country's Dutch- and French-speaking regions. Belgium's linguistic quandary is an issue of enormous consequence (and one on which Language Log has been peculiarly silent), but I'll let more informed voices chime in on the collapse of the Leterme government. Instead, as is my wont, I'm going to sidestep the weighty geopolitical repercussions and focus on a small but interesting typo in the Associated Press article, "Belgian premier offers resignation amid deadlock":

On his "Freakonomics" blog on the New York Times website, Stephen J. Dubner has just learned the perils of the Bierce/Hartman/McKean/Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (corrections of linguistic error are themselves prone to error). In a July 8th post entitled "Dept. of Oops," he notes this lead sentence in a recent article in The Economist:

In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.

Dubner writes:

They meant to write "pastries" but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties.