ER for July 2010

From the archives

By John T. Harding

Second Series
Volume II, Number 4
July, 2010



   BEWARE OF ABSOLUTES -- The $100 bill is "the highest value of all U.S. bills." Or so said The Associated Press. Not so. There are bills in denominations of $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000. And while they were discontinued in 1969, there are still some in the hands of collectors, and are still legal tender. The government also made bills denominated $100,000, but these were for use only for transactions between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.

   SOUND AND FURY -- Dinty Ramble objected to the nasal allergy commercial that claims the product "combats the cause." Of course. If it didn't, it would be of no value. And there's the gadget that claims if you plug it into your car radio system, you can use your cell phone, and talk safely while driving. It's not the gadget that causes distracted driving, it's the act of talking. Remember the signs on buses that said "Do not talk to driver while vehicle is in motion"?

   HASTY HEADLINES -- Or, beware the obvious. "Suicidal tendencies can be fatal."

  TOO BROKE TO PAY ATTENTION -- ABC-TV outlet in Philly touted a story about thieves "who stole $500 million in priceless art works." If they're priceless, where did the dollar figure come from?

   GLEANINGS of an Itinerant Speller -- Respitory; "a huge menu to please any pallet"; "miniature Doberman pincher." "Forecasted" does not need the extraneous -ed ending. The verb is "forecast" in both present and past tense.

  HYPHEN MAVEN HAVEN -- The rules of hyphenation, including where to break a word at the end of a line -- are relatively few and simple. So much so that a computer can be taught them. However, computers do not yet know semantics. The meaning of a word, especially one that has several conjoined parts, can dictate where a word should be split. Examples from daily newspapers recently include these: green-skeeper, new-spaper, and la-cebark. This last word referred to a type of elm tree, and appeared on Page one of the Philadelphia Inquirer. But the worst recent example came from the New York Times, where the computer produced this: th-ere. And from across the pond comes this example: Ma-rtin.

  THANKS BRO -- The above thought were prompted by a message from Jim: "I have noticed in recent times that the usage of hyphenation seems to have discarded all the rules that I was taught when in school. There were not very many rules to remember, which made it simple. If hyphenation could be avoided, then that was the preferred option; one rule was to only hyphenate between syllables, another was to avoid hyphenating someone's name. If a name needed to be broken up, then the rule of syllables still applied. Rules can be put into computers and they are very good at following them, so word processing does not seem to be the source of this situation."

  REPLY -- This has been an issue for me ever since the advent of computers. Yes, it is possible to program the few hyphenation rules into a computer, but there are also thousands of exceptions that a computer cannot know. Early on, I noticed that a computer hyphenated "newspaper" by following the rule governing consonant clusters: Break after the first consonant. This, of course, resulted in "new-spaper." Compounds always seem to give the machine problems. In your example, the rule (as I remember it) is to break after a vowel and before a consonant, so the machine did, in fact, follow the rule. You're right that rules can be put into computers, and computers are very good at following them. The machine will do exactly what it is told to do. No more, and no less. Until machines can be taught semantics -- the meanings of words -- human oversight is essential. Another problem is defining what constitutes a syllable; people do it almost instinctively. Machines must be taught by prescribing rules. But the ability to think remains a human trait. How do you tell a machine which word is a name and which is not? In addition
to the set of rules, computers I have dealt with also consult a lexicon to double-check for appropriate hyphenation. But it still requires human intervention to keep feeding new words into the lexicon. GIGO still applies.



Editor's Revenge is a free newsletter on the use, misuse and abuse of the English language in America. Logomachist: J.T. Harding. To subscribe, send your email address to: jtharding39@gmail.com or to editorsrevenge@gmail.com.