new guidelines for sports interviews

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 8/14/07, Michael H Covarrubias <mcovarru at purdue.edu> wrote:
> From an AP story on the new NFL concussion policy
>
> <http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-nflconcussions&prov=ap&type=lgns>
>
> > The guidelines include prohibiting
> > any player who has lost conciseness
> > from returning to a game or practice.
> > It outlines the symptoms, which
> > include confusion; problems with
> > immediate recall...
>
> So I guess when an athlete is hit in the head they ask him to state his name,
> give his age, and defend capitalism in fewer than 25 words.

Surely the Cupertino Effect in action, wherein an automatic
spellchecker miscorrects an error. MS Word gives "conciseness" as the
first alternative for various plausible misspellings of
"consciousness", such as "conscisness", "conscesness", "conshisness",
"concisness" and "concusness". (I like the last one as a possibility,
since the error could have been influenced by the frequent use of
"concussion" in the article.)

600+ Googelhits for "lost conciseness", some of it metacommentary on
the error itself.

More on the Cupertino Effect:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002911.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003629.html


--Ben Zimmer

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