Yes, it’s almost 2010!
Can you believe it? [Sigh] Y2K such a distant memory. The Internet bubble still expanding. Housing prices still soaring and airlines still solvent.
Anyway, the new issue is online and as always I’m pumped about it. The issue contain a complete ASH WEDNESDAY order of worship for you to adapt for your own use, and it has a retrospective piece about the 100th Anniversary of the Boys Scouts of America.
Here’s a sample from “Did You Mean?”:
Paperview boxing.
No, that isn’t a rage new sport featured in the X Games. It isn’t a derogatory term for the way an editor slashes up flabby writing. It has nothing to do with the classic knock on a soft boxer: “He couldn’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag.”
It’s a search engine typo for “pay-per-view boxing.” In fact, it was one of the top search typos registered by Yahoo! last summer.
Other top gaffes included “Brack Obama” and “swan flu.” ... Honest or ignorant, such typos happen to all of us as we fill search boxes with inquiries. Knowing this, search engines use spell-check software to predict what we were actually looking for in the first place.
Go to Google and type “Homeletics” in the search box, and Google leads your search result with, “Did you mean Homiletics?” It’s funny to then scroll the list of misspelled search results below it. Apparently, there are a lot of blogs, a few professors and even an online bookstore offering thoughts on this accidental art.
Mark Paskin, a senior engineer with Google, notes that two kinds of misspellings occur on the site: simple typos and conceptual errors. The former is a mistake made for a known word, but the latter happens when people don’t know how to spell something in the first place.
“Paperview boxing” is a perfect example. This is when the Google spelling correction function really tries to read our minds.
“U tube” is another common conceptual error. Almost everyone mistyping this phrase is looking for the video site YouTube; they just don’t know how to spell it. But a u-tube is actually a U-shaped glass tube used to determine the density of liquids and gases. If your daughter is doing research for chemistry class, she’d have to go to the third page of Google search results to get u-tube information, as opposed to YouTube information.
Typos are just mistakes. But these “conceptual errors” are the kind we’re looking at in Jeremiah 1. ...
And the material continues.
Take a look.
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