Sun 30 Oct 2005
If you Google “Fisher DeBarry”, EphBlog is currently number 1 on the list of links, thanks to Derek Catsam’s post two days ago. Cool or weird or pathetic? I don’t know.
UPDATE: Ahhh. It’s because we misspelled DeBerry! Hmmm. Perhaps misspelling in the search for hits is no vice . . .
October 31st, 2005 at 1:07 pm
Typo fixed (Fortunately I got it right in the text; unfortunately, I’d say that Ephblog’s domination of the topic now has come to an end once spelling is normalized.)
October 31st, 2005 at 2:47 pm
I’m not sure what html tags version of EphBlog’s Movable Type (3.16) supports, but it would be interesting to include the misspelling in an invisible tag or such (if possible).
One significant fact often ignored by many internet marketers is that a remarkable number of Americans do not use standardized spellings. (In other language, “can’t spell,” but that’s not what I’m trying to say).
Saturday, I took down the names of several long URLs, carefully pronounced in advertizements on Forbes radio. Likely those radio spots cost over $100,000 for the day. In none of the cases had the company bothered to register the obvious alternate “mis-spellings” of the domains, which would have cost a few hundred dollars at the most.
In only one case did Google point to the correct site in its suggestions.
I am not entirely a fan of standardized spelling, a result of slogging through Luther in the originals etc. (One of the wonders of German is that it is a major language that has been stabilized for only a century and a half or so, cf. Orwell’s Politics and the English Language and John Roberts’ schoolteacher grammarianism).
Grammars, after all, are living symbolic networks. What you think of them says a lot about how you are likely to interpret the constitution. [Abk]
In the realm of the Internet, the absolute lack of attention to spelling in some forums is amazing and interesting to me (interesting in the sense that I can get through a page of Luther’s original faster than I can get through logs from many chatrooms). I generally do not think much of such forums (which may be a poorly formed opinion), but the de-fixation of the language in these contexts is startling.
Now that Google is moving to strictly “AI” approaches to knowledge matching (that is, matching your query to results they predict will interest you, and to ads they think will interest you, based on a pile of data about you and similar searchers), will the small bubble of chat-spelling burst outside the niche?
Not only is the blog post above an interesting example of how a linguistic deviation (perhaps an error, perhaps not) can have unexpected results, it is also an example of how a positive feedback loop can reinforce a deviation and possibly bring it into common usage. (If Google is weighing the article title more highly, the author has a very high incentive to use the purported “mis-spelling” to gain attention, and if the only goal were to gain readership, perhaps the spelling “correction” is in fact an error).
Personally, as English has no clear phonetic rules in the case, I don’t generally care whether someone uses “DeBarry” or “DeBerry” to represent someone’s name. What is the information carried? What is the effect? The interesting thing here is that the transition to a new media (with all kinds of new feedback systems and social rules) can so radically change the result of a lexigraphical variation.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled program.
October 31st, 2005 at 6:19 pm
Poor spelling - poor diction - poor grammar. Hell -they are nothing - the typical blogger can’t or won’t reason.