Schlimmbesserung

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

Tim McDaniel writes me to point out net discussions of the useful
German word "Schlimmbesserung" 'correcting badly' in English, used to
refer to making a mistake when correcting someone else's mistake (an
all too common event, in my experience).  Unfortunately, there seem
to be some who use it to refer to corrections that make things worse
-- also a common event (familiar to those who use Miscrosoft Word's
grammar checker, for instance), but not the same thing.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)