Bomb thread in the Guardian
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Oliver Millman, "Biden hits pause on natural gas projects amid thread of carbon ‘mega bombs’", The Guardian 1/26/2024.
Or maybe that should be The Grauniad?
B.L., who sent in the link, commented:
The same typo (or is it a typo??) appeared in the summary on the home page.
I can't decide whether this is some new meaning of "thread" – growing out of the email use of "thread" to refer to a series of linked messages – or a General American headline writer with intervocalic "flapping" getting momentarily confused between "threat" and "thread", or (perhaps most likely) a General American headline writer DICTATING a headline to a speech-recognition system and the system responding to the effective neutralization of /t/ and /d/ intervocalically by choosing "thread" rather than "threat". I have no idea what sort of uses speech recognition gets put to in a news room nowadays.
The body of the article includes one instance of threat:
“This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is – the existential threat of our time,” Biden said, adding that Republicans who support ever-expanding fossil fuel infrastructure “wilfully deny the urgency of the climate crisis”.
…and none of thread. So the typo (or speech-to-text-o?) theory seems most likely to me. And examples like "'Long live our noble Kingn'" make the lapsus digiti theory plausible.
Perhaps the combination of fewer copy editors and more NLP will take us back to the olden days, at least in terms of the frequency of errors from whatever source?
The obligatory screenshot:
Update — now it's "plans for" instead of "threads of" ???
Jenny Chu said,
January 26, 2024 @ 7:58 am
I think it is good, old-fashioned autocorrect.
Philip Taylor said,
January 26, 2024 @ 8:02 am
And I completely failed to spot the typo. My initial belief was that the Guardian intended to refer to carbon bonds, not carbon bombs, and it was only when I read the linked article that I realised that "bombs" really was intended. I then returned to the LL posting and still failed to spot the typo until I read the posting in its entirety.
Anthony Bruck said,
January 26, 2024 @ 9:38 pm
American, born in NYC, long resident in Chicago. I have never heard anyone pronounce threat as thread. (As a kid, I wondered why the characters in Westerns said "pardner" for "partner"; so much for my idiolect.)
Bob Ladd said,
January 27, 2024 @ 3:15 am
@Anthony Bruck: Try saying a phrase like "the threat of war" or a whole sentence like "they moved away because of the threat of flooding". It's certainly possible to pronounce "threat" in that context so that it's clearly distinct from "thread", but for most North American English speakers it's more natural not to.