Proofreading entertainment
I
posted
a little while back on
yellow star
thistle counting as two words rather than three, entertained the
possibility that
star thistle
had originally been
starthistle
but had been "corrected" by a proofreader to
star thistle, and noted that I was
inclined to misread
starthistle
as
start-histle. This
elicited some mail about proofreading, all of it entertaining.
First, there's a Taylor Mali video entitled "The Impotence of
Proofreading" (actually, Mali
SAYS "The the Impotence
of Proofreading"), available several places on-line; here's the
link to
YouTube. It's a comedy routine packed with (spoken versions of)
typos of all kinds -- word confusions, letter substitutions, omitted
material, extra material, transpositions -- many of them off-color (
anal for
any,
Sale of Two Titties, and one of the
lessons of the routine: "There is no prostitute for careful
proofreading").
I got pointers to this video from Marilyn Martin and Chris
Waterson. Waterson wrote:
I love the fact that I can watch that
and completely understand what he's saying? Why is that?! :)
So there's actually a linguistic question here. The short answer
is that we use context and background knowledge to interpret what we
hear -- to the extent that we fail to notice many speech errors that we
encounter -- and that Mali has been careful to provide enough context
to help us along.
Then Mae Sander picked up on the word division question and started an
exchange with me about automated hyphenation programs and their
discontents. First she cited things like
Small boys in kneep-
ants
Team leaders called co-
aches
Then she told a story:
.. in the very early days of text
processing, before personal computers, writers typed on typewriters.
Their copy went to data-entry clerks who knew a mark-up language and
created computer files with teletype machines or DecWriters. Reviewers
and copyreaders received output from huge line-printers, which produced
formatted copy on wide fan-fold paper in a monospace typeface. Typeset
output (including results of automatic hyphenation) was the very last
step in the process. The galley proofs arrived from an offsite Linotron
typesetting machine, driven by paper tape from the mainframe computer.
This is true: the introduction to the manual for a commercial version
of one such text processor and its complex procedures contained this
sentence:
This product eliminates the need for
pro-
ofreaders.
This story was so wonderful that I was dubious about it, but she's now
supplied a ton of convincing detail. In any case, pro-ofreaders
were clearly not obsolete then. Nor are they now. Though
brute-force methods -- really really big dictionaries with possible
hyphenations specified -- can improve things considerably, and
undoubtedly have.
I pointed out a few years back on the ADS-L that even correct
hyphenations at line end can be troublesome, and Geoff Pullum
posted
here about my example:
to obtain what he
wanted amid the scar-
city of planned economic life...
Surely someone has made a collection of line-break hyphenations gone
awry. And no, I don't want to start one myself.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 28, 2007 05:14 PM