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A newspaper website recently posted a story about a man who accidentally dug up a grenade. The man called 911, and a few hours later, according to the story, “the grenade was denoted” behind the local fire station.
Um…what?
They denoted the grenade?
Denote means to mark or indicate—obviously not the right word here. Even the most casual reader would assume that the reporter meant detonate. But how did it get to be denote, a word with a completely unrelated meaning?
Here’s one scenario: Suppose the reporter typed detoned instead of detonated (easy enough to do in haste), and then hastily ran spellcheck. And then, perhaps distracted, accepted one of the spellchecker’s suggestions without really looking at it.
Tah-DAH. Denoted instead of detonated.
This same kind of thing happens often to those of us who use word processors; so often, in fact, that there’s a term to describe a word’s unintentional replacement by one of the wildly inappropriate suggestions offered by the spellchecker.
It’s called the Cupertino effect.
The name arose some years ago among writers in the European Union when they discovered the spellcheckers in their word processors were changing the word cooperation (written without the hyphen) to Cupertino. This gave rise to such odd sentences as “The Cupertino with our Italian comrades proved to be very fruitful.”
Why the name of a California city would have been in an EU spellchecker’s list of acceptable words back then is not entirely clear; it may or may not have anything to do with the fact that Cupertino is the home of Apple computers.
In any event, the rules that spellcheckers go by have come a long way in the last ten years, and the word Cupertino itself has been removed from many spellcheckers. But the effect continues. I saw a headline on a CNBC screen last year that said, “The market wants to divulge into chaos.” Since divulge means to disclose something (usually private or secret information), that word obviously makes neither grammatical nor logical sense here. I suspect it was the Cupertino effect at work, but I’m still trying to figure out what the word should have been. Devolve, perhaps?
Somewhere else I ran across pursued in a context that suggested it should have been perused. That Cupertino is easy to work out; if you type purused instead of perused, Microsoft Word’s first suggestion is pursued.
I saw the word condensation in a blog entry recently, where the context clearly called for condescension. Not sure if the writer just reached for the wrong word, or if that was a Cupertino as well.
In the technical books I work on every day, the Word feature that puts the red squiggles under misspelled words is normally turned off, because the red squiggles triggered by all the programming jargon would be distracting to the reviewers. But sometimes, if I’m sufficiently bored, I’ll turn the red squiggles back on and right-click on a red-squiggled technical term just to see what Word thinks it ought to be. For example, for the word symlin k, Word suggests soy milk. For the word precached, Word suggests preached.
Yes, I know; no reviewer working on a technical book is going to be looking at—let alone considering—a spellchecker’s suggestions. But the lesson is unmistakable: Never let your word processor change anything automatically, and even if you go through the misspelled words manually, never ever let your mind wander.
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