Many of us who wrestle words for a living know the perils of ye olde "search and replace" gambit. My favourite apocryphal story is of the hapless writer who wished to change the name of his protagonist from David to Derek and did a global MS search-and-replace on the two names... which ended up with him being called, amidst much guffawing, to explain the alternate-universe masterpiece of Michaelangelo's Derek. One of my own recent snicker-worthy examples was replacing "Tina" as a character name, seeing as the story she featured in already had several characters whose names began with a T and my editor thought it might be a good idea not to tempt fate. So - just to keep it close to my original vision - I changed her name to Kristin.
And got laughed at mercilessly when
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
rdeck,who was helping me proofread, pointed to an abomination of a word which read "desKristintion"... which used to be a perfectly good desTINAtion in a previous incarnation.
Now, via
jaylake, there's
this.
You just have to love the idea of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth...
Comments
Sounds like a cussword, doesn't it? "I would've won the tournament, but I dropped my fabring sword!"
There should be a special blog for that, inviting people to submit their favourite clashes with the computer-knows-better syndrome...
The Queen Elizabeth bee is an amusing image -- I dimly remember coming across something like that a while back and thinking that was what must have happened. (It's seems to be an American thing to refer to HM as "Queen Elizabeth"; the British media wouldn't put it that way.)
Edited at 2008-02-03 11:03 pm (UTC)
(dictionary definition number 1:
inchipience [in-CHIP-ience], noun, the instant between noticing a Burger King ad on TV at half past midnight and realising you absolutely CRAVE French Fries RIGHT NOW...
(it's working NOW. But this was just particularly delicious given the topic of the post...0
(Of course, then you have to do multiple passes, with "Kristen's" and other variants.)
She had written a paper on the civil rights movement in the 60s, and in the paper she had a sentence that went something like: "African-Americans during this time period were treated like second-class citizens." Only she'd apparently munged the word citizen very badly. She got the paper back with a big red circle around the word and the comment in the margins: "Is this what you meant to say?"
Indeed, the sentence had been changed to: "African-Americans during this time period were treated like second-class chitlins."
I do believe she learned her lesson after that.