Kevin Drum, "Federal judge uses very strange words to overturn LNG pause", jabberwocking 7/2/2024: Early this year the Department of Energy paused approvals of new LNG terminals. Several states sued, saying the decision was arbitrary and was costing them a lot of money. Yesterday a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana (of course) issued a preliminary injunction […]
Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky described a category of typos that he called "completion errors": …a "completion error", a typo that results you start writing or typing a word and then drift part-way in to another word. I do this all too often with -ation and -ating words — starting the verb COOPERATING but ending […]
In a comment on yesterday's "Software testing day" post, ernie in berkeley offered a nice "QA Engineer walks into a bar" joke, and pointed us to its origin in an old xkcd comic "Exploits of a Mom": …which in turn reminded me of an old problem, discussed in "Excel invents genes", 8/26/2016:
A colleague recently called my attention to "rapid b’ball fans". Carol Kennedy remarked to me that what the colleague intended was "rabid b’ball fans". Carol noted further that her father, Leigh Lisker, an experimental phonetician and specialist on Telugu who was in the departments of linguistics and South Asian Regional Studies at Penn and was […]
In this age of typing on computers and other digital devices, when we daily input thousands upon thousands of words, we are often amazed at the number and types of mistakes we make. Many of them are simple and straightforward, as when our fingers stumblingly hit the wrong keys by sheer accident. People who type […]
Maidhc Mac Roibin sent in this photograph of the front of a dessert shop in Cupertino from Fintano's flickr site:
"Teens charged with Qld arsenal 'completely despicable'", Sky News 9/11/2019.
This has been a busy week for me, wherefore no posts — a full day at Penn on Monday; Tuesday and Wednesday at Baidu in Sunnyvale; Thursday at Apple in Cupertino; Friday at ETS in San Francisco; lunch with Geoff Nunberg on Saturday; and then an afternoon at Scale By The Bay 2018. There were […]
When the White House issued a statement that finally condemned white supremacists for the violence in Charlottesville this weekend, the version that was originally released had an unusual typo: "nephew-nazi" for "neo-Nazi": The president said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred and of course that […]
Jack Maloney sent in a link to a talk at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute about "Plant Soil Microbiomes in Perineal Agriculture": Switching from an annual agriculture system to a perineal agriculture system that most closely resembles natural prairies will include changes to the way we manage soil, the lifespan of the plants, and […]
Barbara Philips Long writes: Apple and other autofill writing software have contributed a lot to eggcorns, I suspect. I enjoyed this comment about supply-siders, which called them "supply spiders": I am now imagining Carl Icahn as a supply spider. I suspect that Barbara is right to attribute this coinage to someone's autocorrect function, in which […]
On Twitter, John Lewis shared a prime example of the perils of global search-and-replace: what happens when "km" gets expanded to "kilometres" in an edition of Trivial Pursuit. Trivial Pursuit makers change all mentions of "km" to "kilometres" as a universal find and change. Can't see what could go wrong there. pic.twitter.com/956hYeJw3B — John Lewis […]
Nick Kaldis writes: I've started buying English etymology books for my 8-year-old daughter and I to explore; today we discovered that "butterfly" comes from "butter" + "shit", because their feces resemble butter.