March 05, 2007

Automatedly


A footnote to Geoff Pullum's posting on the Ly Detector (yes, that's what it's called)...

Geoff says:

Poor Gina Trapani has been duped into thinking that a tool for hunting for adverbs would be a valuable addition to the writer's toolbox. As a result she wasted some valuable programming time. It's not her fault; it's [E. B.] White's fault.

Erin McKean, who first pointed me to Trapani's program (via the enthusiastic hackzine site), provided the wry slogan: "Anything that's not worth doing is worth automating."  Stanley Peters hedged this: "Some things that aren't worth doing are worth automating."  Geoff's position is that not everything that can be automated is worth doing.

zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 5, 2007 05:16 PM