Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Yet more editing in restaurants
The Washington Post has a piece up on one writer’s desire to do editing work even while dining out: “Typos a la Carte, Ever A Specialty of the House.” Jane Black writes of her fantasy to take a “distinctive purple pen” to the error-ridden menus in the restaurants she frequents.
Not only did this article connect nicely to my earlier post on the Typo Eradication Advancement League (also mentioned by Black), it taught me a new word: mesclun, “a mixture of young tender greens.” Black has seen this replaced with “mescaline” on more than one occasion, probably thanks to auto-correction in word processing software—the Cupertino effect.
The auto-correct feature is a potentially dangerous line of defense. That mesclun/mescaline problem could be the computer’s, not the chef’s. One mistake I’ve never seen on a menu but would actually savor is the one I lived in fear of when I worked in Boston. Despite my attempts to stop it, my Microsoft Word program would always change the word for Italy’s famous cured meat into what it assumed I meant to type. The night we closed an issue, I would have nightmares that when the magazine hit the stands, one of my reviews would describe “the delicate sweet and salty balance of melon and prostitute.”
Well, at least it was consistent.
(Spotted on Language Log.)