The mysteries of paintballing

Mon Oct 2 18:41:26 UTC 2006

OK, Ben -- but remember, I also speculated about a spellchecker effect!

Joel

At 10/2/2006 01:55 PM, you wrote:
>Now appearing on Language Log...
>
>http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003629.html
>
>Comments welcome.
>
>On 10/1/06, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>>
>>At 9/30/2006 08:52 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>> >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
>>
>>Amusing; thanks, Ben.  So, remembering the earlier "orthodentist"
>>discussion, I tried Word on "orthodentist" and
>>"orthodentify|fied".  Quel disappointment.
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org