Schlimmbesserung

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 10:03:54 -0700, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:

>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.

Great!  So yet another term for McKean's/Skitt's/Hartman's Law...

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002035.html



--Ben Zimmer