NYT Goofup is a syntactic blend

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 03/17/2002 2:56:13 PM Eastern Standard Time,
garethb2 at EARTHLINK.NET writes:

> Years ago, in computer geek circles, these were playfully referred to as
>  "Word turds," which I guess one could define as "crap left over from a
>  previous sentence form." One of the drawbacks of wordpro composition, I
>  supppose. As an editor, I see these all the time in manuscripts.

Is "wordpro" actually used as a short form of "word processing"?  I have not
heard it.

Also, WordPro is a word processing package from Lotus (it used to be known as
AmiPro, I don't know when the name change occurred.)

According to the Encyclopedia Americana, article on Word Processing, the term
"word processing" was coined IN GERMAN at IBM's Swiss labs and then was
translated into English.

     - Jim Landau

P.S.  At work Black History Month ended with a tribute to the Harlem
Renaissance, followed by an "ethnic buffet".  Whoever did the slide show
portion of the tribute must have been thinking too hard of the buffet, as
there were slides about "George Washington Craver" and "Marcus Gravey".