Never Trust A Computer
“Trust the computer. The computer is your friend.”
I still remember that excellent piece of irony from the role-playing game Paranoia, designed as a spoof of other games – but immense fun in its own right. It was set in a techno-future where The Computer ran everything, but was unfortunately very unstable. Secret societies, conflicting missions for people in the same group, a Research & Development department that owed more to the Keystone Kops than James Bond… wonderful.
This came to mind because I have been editing again. It was the end of the big “animal species” job (for the moment) and, as I deleted, re-worded and formatted, I thought: “Why is this writer getting their apostrophes wrong?”
A little light bulb lit over my head. Here’s an example of why:
This bird enjoys a diet of fish, insect’s crustaceans and small invertebrates.
If you paste that sentence into your word-processor, the green, squiggly grammar-lines will not appear. However, that apostrophe should not be there. Delete the apostrophe and the grammar-lines appear. Why is that?
It’s because, without the apostrophe, “insects crustaceans” makes no sense. Word thinks that the crustaceans belong to the insects, so it suggests putting the apostrophe in, but what’s really needed is a comma, like this:
This bird enjoys a diet of fish, insects, crustaceans and small invertebrates.
The second example is this:
This animal has a dark breast, while lighter fur covers it’s under parts.
Once again, you can paste that into Word and the software’s happy with it – and once again, it’s wrong. The apostrophe should not be there. But why?
This one’s a bit more difficult. Word reads the latter half of the sentence as “fur covers it is under parts”. Taking the apostrophe out annoys the software because Word then believes that “fur covers its under” – with “under” as a the thing covered by fur – and doesn’t know what to do with the extra word at the end.
The computer is confused because ”under parts” should be a single word. Depending on which dictionary or style guide you use, the two words need to be concatenated or hyphenated, giving:
“This animal has a dark breast, while lighter fur covers its underparts [or under-parts].”
The lesson to learn? Never trust a computer – and don’t just right-click and accept the suggested changes!
Pip pip ol’ Bean…couldn’t agree more…:- )
But Damn! I couldn’t imagine having the patience and/or other mental illnesses required to articulate such things with such depth & precision…bluddy impressive Cobba :- ).
I reckon there are a lot of folks on the planet yet scratching there beans about these annoying anomalies, wondering ‘Why?’ and even ‘How?’ they happen. But I don’t know of anyone, anywhere, that has actually articulated it…let alone with aplomb akimbo :- )
Nice one mate :- )
Cheers
Stephen G
Ooh! Crap! Not ‘there beans’…’their beans’ :- P
Cheers
Stephen G
Wow! You sure put the ‘nazi’ into ‘grammar nazi’. What an interesting exposition. I hope it helps some folk realise that while most of us can string a sentence, few know how to use the right beads.
“This bird enjoys a diet of fish, insects, crustaceans and small invertebrates.”
I think better would be: “This bird enjoys a diet of fish and invertebrates such as insects and crustaceans.”
While grammatically your sentence makes sense, logically it still has a quirk in that insects and crustaceans are both invertebrates.
Also, I might object in principle to calling it ‘this animal’ rather than naming the animal outright. I’d have probably looked for a better word that ‘under-parts’ as well. ie., find a diagram of a bird to use the proper vocabulary rather than substituting. Here’s a diagram. It would appear that one might say that the breast is dark (what color?) while the belly is lighter.
My 2 cents.
PS – don’t trust a computer: The computer did its job. The sentence was grammatically proper. The meaning of the sentence, however, was not. As one might say, the crustaceans do not belong to the insects. I think I’d prefer to say that a computer cannot replace a competent editor.
Spike,
Very clever post. True as well. It just shows that writing is not as easy as some folks think.
In the end, you really do need to know what you are doing!
George
Stevo: Shame you got to that little error before I did, eh?
Paul: Thank you kindly, sir. It’s the little things that help, in my opinion – understanding why those squiggly green lines appear, rather than just re-wording to fix it!
Steven: Or just put “other” in front of “invertebrates”. “Underparts” is a birding term and thus appropriate here. But yes, not the best phrasing ever! The post here was more about understanding the computer’s reaction than the wording, though.
George: The day they invent a computer that can think like a human, I will happily retire. As long as it isn’t a psychotic computer.