The mysteries of paintballing

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 9/30/06, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
>  From the Arlington (Mass.) Advocate (although a newspaper not in my
> estimation having the highest quality writing and typesetting):
>
> Police responded to Wellington Street about youths shooting
> paintballs from a home.  Police denitrified the youths and seized the
> paintball guns.
>
> A mystery to me.  Is this a chemical decontamination process, or a
> strange typo for -- or a computer-determined "correction" of some
> misspelling of -- "identified"?

Yes, this looks like a spellchecker artifact. Most likely the
misspelling was "dentified" -- MS Word suggests "identified",
"dandified", and "denitrified". Another word processing program might
rank "denitrified" first.

By the way, this has been dubbed "the Cupertino effect" by European
Union translators:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002911.html


--Ben Zimmer

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