Beware the Spellchecker

by Kieran Healy on May 4, 2007

This month’s issue of _Contemporary Sociology_ contains the following erratum notice:

bq. In the January issue … in the review written by Elizabeth Gorman of _The Work and Family Handbook: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives and Approaches_, edited by Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, Ellen Ernst Kossek, and Stephen Sweet, the contributors’ last names should have been spelled “Karen Gareis” instead of “Karen Agrees,” “Laura Beavais” instead of “Laura Beavers,” and “Gerstel and Sarkisian,” not “Gretel and Sardinian.” We regret the errors.

{ 20 comments }

1

Filter 05.04.07 at 9:01 pm

“Gretel and Sardinian” is almost too beautiful to be true.

2

Gorgle Erf 05.04.07 at 9:08 pm

In college, I recall a spell-cheker trying to change “beingness” to “penises” on one of my papers.

3

Nix 05.04.07 at 9:34 pm

Ah, the Cupertino effect. (The typo `coperation’ got turned into this by MS Word 97 and below, and a *lot* of political stuff, notably EU documents, talks blithely about Cupertino as a result.)

4

P.D. 05.04.07 at 10:00 pm

One of my friends once graded a paper in which the word ‘enzyme’ had been misspelled in a way such that it was systematically replaced with ‘enema’.

5

harry b 05.04.07 at 10:10 pm

Glad its never happened to me:
Brighouse = Birdhouse

6

BillCinSD 05.04.07 at 10:52 pm

I used to have a grad student named Wensel, that Word wanted to change to Weasel

7

rea 05.04.07 at 11:51 pm

. . . And a friend of mine named “Yanich,” had his name routinely changed to “Eunuch” . . .

8

Henry (not the famous one) 05.05.07 at 1:15 am

But let’s also give a tip of the hat to the poetic inventions that a not quite top of the line scanner will produce. In the ten-year-old Washington Monthly article on Fred Thompson that is linked to over at Kevin Drum’s page you will find:

With iris traditional Southern values . . . he could win his tough race with dim Cooper if . . . Thompson doesn’t seem passionate about anything except being Ol’ Erred. . .

There’s more, of course.

Maybe we should send Naked Lunch through the scanner a few times to see what we get.

9

David 05.05.07 at 3:25 am

See, now if you had titled this “Don’t Fear the Spellchecker” I could have gotten a “this thread needs more cowbelle” joke in there.

10

Gene O'Grady 05.05.07 at 3:56 am

And I had an office mate named Nikaido once. I caught MicroSoft in the act before the memo went out saying “Please contact Mrs. Naked…”

11

Jacob Christensen 05.05.07 at 12:33 pm

At one point my Firefox spellchecker intervened in German politics with the following result:

Müntefering – suffering
Stoiber – liberator
Merkel – Berkeley (a Protestant pragmatist politician is turned into a Catholic idealist philosopher!)
Linkspartei – “disparateness”, “kindergarten”
Lothar Bisky – “loathing risky”

Right now the spellchecker is protesting against this post and arguing that the word “spellchecker” does not exist.

So be it…

12

Miriam 05.05.07 at 2:42 pm

I remain fond of “Percy Bushel Shelley.”

13

Thom Brooks 05.05.07 at 2:50 pm

More reason to use WordPerfect!

14

Dave Maier 05.05.07 at 3:33 pm

Heidegger = Headgear (that skullcap he used to wear, I imagine).

15

mollymooly 05.05.07 at 4:53 pm

#11: George Berkeley was not Catholic. Only Protestants could study at Trinity College Dublin until over 100 years after his death.

16

mrjauk 05.06.07 at 2:43 am

Word wanted to name a History Professor at Yale Ivy Banal.

17

Blix 05.06.07 at 3:02 am

I used to routinely make a typing mistake that spellcheck WOULDN’T catch. Instead of “does not” I would type a phrase concerning a female deer.

18

Fr. 05.06.07 at 4:48 pm

Cupertino effect (cf. comment #3): priceless.

19

sara 05.07.07 at 5:15 am

This is why I never use the damn thing (the automatic spellcheck bot). I do classical history and what the bot would turn Greek and Roman names into doesn’t bear thinking about. Probably medical terminology.

20

Harald K 05.07.07 at 7:10 am

A classic reported by a Christian newspaper here: Bishop Desmond Tutu – Bishop Demon Tut.

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