What happens when a misspelling gets enshrined in official documentation? Mike Pope, a technical writer and editor at Microsoft, looks at some embarrassing typographical errors that continue to linger in the world of computer programming.
Sometimes accidents become standards. My favorite such story concerns the typewriter technician Martin Tytell. During World War II, Tytell worked for the U.S. Army creating typewriters for many languages that didn't already have them. On the typewriter for Burmese, however, he installed one letter upside down. By the time he learned about the error, the upside-down letter had become institutionalized for typewritten Burmese documents.
In my work editing computer documentation, I've seen several similar situations, where a slip-up early in a development process is not caught. By the time someone notices the erroneous term, it has become a de facto standard.
In my world, probably the best-known example is the Web programming term referrer. In a browser, a referrer is, loosely speaking, the page you were just on. For example, your browser tracks the referrer in case you click the Back button.
When specifications were written for the Web, someone misspelled referrer as referer. (Check out section 10.13 of the HTTP specification here.) The specification became the standard, programmers created browsers according to the specification, and ever since, we've worked with the HTTP_REFERER object. Programmers who try to use the correct term eventually discover that it only works when they intentionally misspell it. (On the other hand, many programmers don't even realize that referer is a misspelling, which is how we ended up in this situation in the first place.)
Another example. For the word mnemonic, you'll often find the variation mneumonic (reasonable, considering how the word is often pronounced). Long ago, a Windows programmer at Microsoft created a function named SHStripMneumonic. This function kicked around in Windows for a long time as what's termed an internal function — something that other Microsoft programmers might use, but not outside programmers. So no one worried about how it was spelled. At some point, however, Microsoft was obliged to publicly document every function, and by then the use of SHStripMneumonic was widespread enough inside Windows that it was no longer practical to try to pretty up the name for public consumption.
More recently, another Microsoft programmer wanted to create a function that involved checking indexes, or as the dressed-up plural has it, indices. But that's another word that people often get not quite right, and the function snuck by all of us and was sprung onto the world by the name HasBaseIndicies. We feel particularly bad about that one, because this happened more-or-less on our watch.
In each case, the error was noted only after the name had gotten out into the wild, so it couldn't be fixed. It's a little like putting a phone number on a business card — you might want to change the number, but by the time you've distributed boxes of cards, lots of people have the old one and you're stuck with it.
A kind of inversion of the standards-by-mistake story occurred when competing browsers were being developed for the Web. Web-page designers can designate colors by using codes (for example, #00FFFF is cyan). But for convenience, you can also just use names for the most common colors. When one of the first browsers was being created, the creators borrowed an existing color-naming scheme in which the color name gray was spelled grey. This isn't a misspelling, of course; it's just that Americans prefer the spelling with -a-. Most browsers were configured to accept either grey or gray. Except one — for many versions, Internet Explorer stubbornly refused to recognize the term grey, recognizing only gray. When it was fed the -e- variation, Internet Explorer either ignored it or rendered the wrong color. This caused endless confusion among Web designers, who had to learn the hard way about Internet Explorer's fussy spelling preferences. (This was finally fixed in recent releases of Internet Explorer.)
It's interesting to contemplate whether these spelling mishaps will contribute toward legitimizing the alternative spellings. As I noted, many programmers are surprised that referer is a misspelling at all. In the future, maybe a programmer who is unsure about the spelling will search the Web and turn up as many instances of referer as referrer. At that point, can we really say which one is right?
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BJC
However, I don't know if one or the other is considered an accidentally standardized misspelling.
I received it as an email:
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Weird Words: OSTROBOGULOUS
The word is weird not only because it looks strange and is rather
rare but because it can refer to something weird (or to a strange,
bizarre or generally unusual happening). To increase its oddity, it
can also mean something mildly risqué, indecent or pornographic.
"Ostrobogulous" was Vickybird's favourite word. It
stood for anything from the bawdy to the slightly off-
colour. Any double entendre that might otherwise have
escaped his audience was prefaced by, "if you will pardon
the ostrobogulosity".
[Magic my Youth, by Arthur Calder-Marshall, 1951.]
It was coined by Victor Neuburg (Vickybird in the quotation), a gay
British Jewish poet and writer and a close friend of the occultist
Aleister Crowley, whose sexual magic practices he helped develop.
Neuburg said that the word was formed, highly irregularly as you
might expect, from Greek "ostro", rich, plus English "bog" in the
schoolboy slang sense of the toilet, hence "dirt", and ending in
Latin "ulus", full of. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't agree,
suggesting that the first part is from "oestrous". But we ought to
let Victor Neuburg have the last word on its etymology, as it was
his creation.
The word is a favourite of people like me who collect interestingly
weird words. A notable recent appearance was in the Mail on Sunday,
a British family newspaper which might have looked askance at it
had its editors known of its indecorous antecedents. It was quoted
as the favourite word of Professor Christian Kay, who has worked
for 42 years on the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English
Dictionary, due to be published next month.
Adobe Systems mistakenly used the word "guillemots" to specify angle-bracket quotes such as > or «this.»
The correct term is "guillemets," not "guillemots."
The popularity of Adobe software has resulted in a truly giggle-worthy situation: it is now a standard typographic practice that quotations should be enclosed between two little black-and-white northern seabirds.
~ML
Speaking of typography, I occasionally read exasperated explanations by professionals that try to clarify the distinction between typeface and font. There's no typo there, of course, but a general misunderstanding of a technical distinction, which has led to the term "font" becoming generalized.
And speaking of punctuation, there also seems to be a relatively common substitution of a backslash for a slash (virgule) -- I frequently see "either\or" and the like. This is a mistake that could not have been made before computers, of course. (Specifically, before 1961.)
Of course I'm constantly annoyed that I have to type Alt+0150* (or Alt+0151) in order to get a dash instead of a hyphen. Except that won't work in Word; you have to type two dashes, then a space then start another word – which is just as annoying if your inserting the dash into a passage you've already written, rather than typing it in mid-flow.
*We'll see how well it works on this forum. Equal chance it comes out looking like a hyphen anyway.
It is a constant annoyance that this combination doesn't work on anything but a Mac. (I use a lot of em dashes in my writing.)