Grammar

At the top of hundreds of webpages belonging to the Shenzhen Energy Corporation, a large power company in Guangdong Province, China, we find the following four main headings: sh?uyè ?? ("Home") x?nwén zh?ngx?n ???? ("News center") tóuz?zh? gu?nxì ????? ("Indicrteurseus") q?yè wénhuà ???? ("Culture") The English translations for items #1, 2, and 4 are acceptable (although I would prefer "Corporate culture" for the fourth one), but what in the world happened with the translation of the third item?  One wonders if the webmaster just dozed off and fell on the keyboard when he got to that one. Strangely, though, "Indicrteurseus" looks as though it should mean something, but it is difficult to determine precisely how it came to be the way it is. In trying to make sense of what was intended, I discovered that "indicrt" is actually a misspelling of the Dutch word indiceert ("indicates").  That, however, could hardly be relevant in the present case. The ending of "indicteurseus" looks vaguely Greek (cf. Perseus, Terseus, and so forth), but it's hard to see how that could be related to "Investor relations" either. At this point, I should mention that there are millions of instances where Chinese corporations correctly render tóuz?zh? gu?nxì ????? as "investor relations", and many common software translation programs provide the right translation. Here's my proposal for roughly what may have happened to produce "indicrteurseus".  First of all, like "investor", "indicrteur" begins with "in" and ends with "r", and they are of approximately the same length (8 letters vs. 10 letters), so there is little doubt that "indicrteur" is a transformation of "investor".  Note that "ind-" is a possible typo or miswriting for the first part of "investor". Next, "relation" can be abbreviated as "rlats", so the remainder of "indicrteurseus" after "indicrteur", namely "seus", may be accounted for as a distortion of something like "rlats".  Note that "rlats" and "seus" both end in an "s" and are of approximately the same length (5 letters vs. 4 letters). My hypothesis is premised upon the idea that someone who knew English scribbled "investor rlats" on a piece of paper and handed it to a web designer who had little to no command of English.  In other words, for "indicrteurseus" to have been derived from "investor relations" in all likelihood would have involved transmission through handwriting that was misinterpreted by the recipient whose job it was to enter what they were handed into the computer, but who was barely literate in English. [h/t Anne Henochowicz]

Emily sent in this picture of a t-shirt that her friend's son was wearing. This is wrong on so many levels. Thanks, Emily!

The writer for Yahoo! Movies isn’t even trying to spell Jason Sudeikis and Colin Farrell: How does one make up the spelling of names and still have a job? Filed under: Misspellings Tagged: Adam Pockross, bad spelling, Colin Farrell, editing, incorrect spelling, Jason Sudeikis, misspelled celebrities, misspelling, proofreading, spelling, spelling error, spelling mistake, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Movies

Just passed on by a member of Team Verb. We have mountains of evidence that immigrants to this country are doing everything they can to learn English, and here's yet more evidence for the point:

Since I have been unabashedly contemptuous of previous stories about dogs learning to understand human languages (for example, in I hammer home the point that fetching named objects is not understanding language in this post, which Mark Liberman followed up here), I think it is incumbent on me to acknowledge further developments in the area. So let me point out that Learning and Motivation has now published a paper about some experiments purporting to show that a 9-year-old border collie called Chaser who has learned rudimentary syntax. For example, it can differentiate To ball take Frisbee from its inverse, To Frisbee take ball, and perform the right action in each case. This Science News article gives a fairly full account of the results. Me? I honestly don't know what I think about this yet. Maybe you want to comment below? I'm cool with that.

Even so-called professional writers make grammatical, punctuation, and spelling mistakes — especially if they work for Yahoo!. Take this example from Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow,” where the writer believes that quotation marks belong after the expression “so-called”: They don’t. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “Quotation marks are not used to set off descriptions that follow expressions such as so-called and self-styled, which themselves relieve the writer of responsibility for the attribution: his so-called foolproof method (not ‘foolproof method’).“ That’s a common mistake. On Yahoo!, there are a lot of common mistakes, like failing to match a pronoun with its antecedent (the word it refers to). And failing to hyphenate modern-day when it’s used as an adjective, misspelling Flintstones, and best of all using peddles instead of pedals: This is more akin to a careless error: And any decent spell-checker would have flagged Minnealpolis as a misspelling: But for Yahoo!’s so-called journalists, spell-checking is optional. Heck, it’s not just optional, it’s nonexistent. Just to be sure we understand that Jeff Stone is a Republican state representative, the writer tells us in two slightly different ways, each containing its own errors: If you think I’m the only person who is appalled by this professional writer’s ignorance, you’d be wrong. Here’s one comment left by a reader: “using peddles underneath their seats” “PEDDLES”???? Jeezuz Joe Bob. My 6-year-old can write better than this. Apparently they’re trying to solve the unemployment problem by giving illiterate idiots jobs writing “news” articles. Sheesh. Filed under: Confused Words, Department of Redundancy Dept., Hyphens, Missing Words, Misspellings, pedal/peddle/petal, Pronouns, Punctuation Tagged: bad grammar, bad spelling, Commonly confused words, editing, Eric Pfeiffer, funny writing errors, funny writing mistakes, grammar, grammar errors, grammar mistakes, homophone, homophones, hyphen, incorrect grammar, incorrect punctuation, incorrect spelling, Minneapolis, missing punctuation, missing word, misspelling, pedal, peddle, pronoun, proofreading, quotation marks, redundancy, repetition, so-called, spelling, spelling mistake, The Sideshow, typo, typos, Yahoo!, Yahoo! News

Paul Krugman ("The Sloppiness Syndrome", NYT 5/22/2013): So what is it with New Republic alumni? First Michael Kinsley, then Charles Lane, weigh in with defenses of austerity that aren’t just wrong, but painfully ill-informed. Kinsley not only makes a really bad analogy between current events and the 1970s, he seems not to know anything about what happened in the 1970s either. Lane attacks stimulus advocates for failing to address an argument that I actually discussed, at length, in my last column but one. Whence cometh this epidemic of sheer sloppiness? I’m not really sure, but in these cases I suspect it has a lot to do with the famed TNR/Slate premium on being “counterintuitive”, which in practice meant skewering supposed liberal pieties. (Kinsley himself joked that TNR should be renamed “Even the liberal New Republic”). Of course, economics is not the only field where pundits are guilty of astonishing carelessness in the service of a story line; nor is clever counterintuiveness the only rhetorical frame that motivates such bullshitting (to use the correct philosophical terminology); nor are TNR and Slate the only publications where such material can be found. For example, David Brooks writes for the New York Times, as Prof. Krugman does, and Brooks' motivation for shockingly sloppy presentations of "facts" and theories is usually to reinforce an all-too-familiar point of view, like "boys and girls need to be educated differently", or "social roles are determined by 'patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago'", or "Western societies have an individualist mentality and Eastern societies have a collectivist mentality", or "individualism and governmentalization are rising, and morality is declining", or some combination of stuff like that. (Though I guess that these long-familiar points of view can also be seen as "counterintuitive … skewering [of] supposed liberal pieties", to the extent that they present earlier supposed conservative pieties.) Anyhow, Krugman concludes that 'twas ever thus: [H]ere’s my guess: if you went back through all the clever counterintuitiveness of past years, you’d find that a lot of it was every bit as sloppy and ill-informed as what we’re seeing now. The difference is the existence now of a policy blogosphere (in economics, of course, but in a number of disciplines too), which makes bluffing harder. In the past grotesquely ill-informed articles on, say, the Clinton health plan could sit out there for years, with only a handful of specialists aware of just how bad they were; now the pundit emperor’s nakedness is all over the web within days if not hours. I suspect that this was true long before the founding of Slate in 1995, with Kinsley as its first editor — and for that matter even before the founding of The New Republic in 1914. But I agree that the world is better off with more of what Ben Goldacre has called "The noble and ancient tradition of moron-baiting", and that the blogosphere, for all its many faults, is the best method so far invented for "[making] bluffing harder". (Obviously, all of the individuals under discussion are in fact highly intelligent — and for that matter so are the people that Goldacre critiques in his column, or the people that Martin Gardner critiqued. This issue is not intelligence, but willingness to bluff in the service of making an argument.)

This phrase has aggravated me since the first time I heard it. Those who use it justify it as being akin to, “...same thing!” which has never sat right me. In my opinion, something is either the same or it is different. By this token, “Same difference!” sounds like a junk phrase that sounds correct but is, in fact, meaningless. It grates for me as much as “irregardless”. Am I incorrect? Is there any validity to this phrase, outside of modern colloquialism?

Maybe a temperamental Shift key is responsible for the randomness of the capital letters on Yahoo! Shine here: and here: Or maybe the writer has no idea that capital letters serve a purpose. Filed under: Capitalizing Tagged: capitalization, editing, Fan Bingbing, proofreading, Shine, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shine

Sometimes I’ll spot a name in the wild and it’ll make me smile all day. Trader Joe’s House Whip is one of those names.   “Whippee!” “Whip-itty-doo-dah!”   Makes me feel like dancing.