The Proletariat Congress

Aside for being known for his dark, bleak prose, notably The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe was also known for his ability to correctly spell the words he used in his poetry. It is a sad testament to his memory that the journalist who was selected to write the story on the better late than never funeral given to the poet couldn’t be bothered to ensure that the man’s name was spelled correctly.

I’ve played a number of different MMOs, and over the years have noticed different typos and spelling errors in quest dialogue boxes and in mission briefings. Today, while playing Champions Online, I was standing around, waiting for a certain object to manifest, when I noticed the following dialogue from a nearby ARGENT henchmen pop up:

Instead of being spelled as ‘Millennium City’, which would have been correct, it showed up as ‘Mellenium City’. At first I thought it was just my imagination, so I paid no mind. After flying around the area for a bit, I saw it again and knew it wasn’t just my imagination.

I could report this, but it’s so insignificant to the overall game, that I am not going to. Instead, I’m just granting it immortality in the depths of my blog, where other notable errors have been recorded over time.

Until the day there is no more bad spelling, Mitra will go on fighting bad spelling in her quest to rid the world of evil.

It has become increasingly apparent that in this day and age, checking over every last detail in an article before sending it out to the presses is becoming a thing of the past. Where have the days gone when journalists and their editors nitpicked over the tiniest details? When they would not let the smallest errors slip by? Seems in this day of Tweets and instant messages, there is no time for attention to detail. As evidenced by the article below that I found in today’s Toronto Star.

One would have thought that a case as widely publicized as the Rengal case that the journalists would have been able to at least spell the name of the victim correctly. Alas, this isn’t the case.

So, Toronto Star, which spelling is it? The one in the first caption, or the one in the second caption? Judging by the first mention of the name, it would be the second spelling. Too bad your editors don’t have the best attention to detail. If they did, you wouldn’t need to have the “Report Error or Complaint” link in this article. Or, for that matter, in any other article because you would have researched your facts and you would have got it correct the first time.

There is a certain level of expectations that people put in our journalists and newspaper editors. One of those expectations is that these people are versed in the language they’re communicating in. In this case, the language of choice would be English. However, it seems that this one expectation isn’t met on a continual basis in the drive to be the first to get a news story out. Gone are the days when an editor would meticulously pour over every word to ensure that what got printed was pure gold. In the age of 24-hour news coverage and internet newspapers, there seems to be little interest in preserving this one tradition. Instead, the editors are slacking and instead relying on the average reader to spot the errors and use the handy “Report typo or correction” link. Right in each article, they are admitting their own journalistic ineptitude by being audacious by admitting they’re too lethargic to spot their own errors before they make a story available for the reader at large.

New criteria alarm immigrant

Another fine example I have to demonstrate the disregard for the English language is this from a screen cap I took while playing Age of Conan. The quest was to get the skins from different corrupted creatures and return the skin to the NPC who can’t tell a hole in a donught from one in his ass, but for some reason, has been standing around all this time waiting for me to come to get him these skins. So, the first part of the quest went fine. Whe I went to redeem the quest, on my way into Old Tarantia, I glanced up to check my mini-map in the upper left hand corner of my screen and I noticed the quest outline next to it and the spelling error. Pray tell, what is a ‘Wolerine’?  Was it perhaps supposed to be a “Wolverine”?

It’s obvious that whoever was spelling checking this was either drugged up on something or their spellchecker was bork’d. In either case… you can always refer to your paper source and look up a word the old fashion way. With a dictionary! I still have a dictionary on my desk. It’s far superior to the dictionaries I can find online because I don’t have to wait for a search engine to do its search. I can find what I need and a nice concise definition. I love my Oxford Dictionary of Current English; I’ve used it since high school and it’s served me well. A spellchecker can never truly replace the paper dictionary or core knowledge of the language in which one is writing.