Twice in one day...
Aug. 26th, 2002 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpEarlier today, one of the folks on the LANTRA-L mailing list posted a query regarding something that Peter Townshend, of The Who, once said about Jimi Hendrix. In the French text she was translating, the quote was:
Taking up the challenge, I hit Google with the following query:
"if only one name" Townsend Hendrix
I hit the jackpot, with the following:
I got the right answer with the wrong query.
It turns out that if you query Google with
Townshend "The Who"
and then again with
Townsend "The Who"
you find they coexist in about a 3-to-1 ratio, which is to say that one in four Web references to The Who's lead guitarist are wrong.
Amazing.
I would not have mentioned it, except that I just got through inserting a photo in a PowerPoint presentation for one of the store's customers, when I noticed a reference to "Zig Zigler" in the text. Now, I've read most of Ziglar's books, which I why I know that his last name is spelled with an 'a' and not an 'e'. So I took the liberty of making the change (No Internet Required™).
The name next to Ziglar's was that of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. I looked hard at that spelling and hit Google again, and at first, I thought my initial gut feeling was right: it was "Rosalyn," wasn't it? There's a whole bunch of hits that say so.
Then I noticed that the second hit on the list spelled the name with one 'n' in the page title, and with two 'n's in the body. I repeated the exercise with Google, searching for hits on
"Rosalynn Carter"
and
"Rosalyn Carter"
With the quotes (so that the search looked for the two words as a single string), "Rosalynn Carter" shows up about 6400 times, while "Rosalyn Carter" yields almost 2000 hits.
Yikes! That's worse than Pete's percentage.
Interestingly enough, if you just look for the two words
Rosalynn Carter
and
Rosalyn Carter
you find the former nets 10,400 hits or so, while the (apparently wrong) second alternative weighs in with almost 15,000 hits!
What's with this? Are such misspellings of "people of celebrity" common? Is there anyone else you can think of who must go through life knowing that a goodly chunk of "the public" can't get their name straight?
* * * I guess part of this "mispropagation" occurs when people think to themselves, "Now, how can I check to make sure I'm spelling this person's name correctly?" and come up with getting on the Internet and hitting Google (or some other search engine) with their candidate spelling and stop there.
For example, let me experiment with the query Abraham Lincon...
...um, 1,040 hits, as of today.
A quick survey of the first couple of pages of hits finds most of the errors occur in page titles (i.e., it's "Lincoln" in the body of the page), or are individual typos. Also, many occurrences of "Lincon" occur on Spanish pages (e.g., "A Abraham Lincon, presidente de los Estados Unidos de América"), though a search on Lincoln presidente yields about 26,000 sites, the first page of hits for which are all in Spanish.
Clearly, something is wrong with "Lincon," but unless you question the results Google spits back out at you, it would seem that "Lincon" is a perfectly acceptable way to spell Honest Abe's name, no?
As interesting as this line of thought may be, it's now getting pretty late. You get the idea, right?
Cheers...
P.S. I would never have hit a search engine to check the spelling of PT's name. I simply knew it was Townsend. Period. End of discussion. :^)
S'il ne reste qu'un nom dans toute l'histoire du rock'n roll dans cent ans, ne cherchez pas, ce sera forcйment Jimi Hendrix."Usually, by the time I read queries like this, about ten people have supplied the answer. This time, however, the best anyone could do was suggest using a reasonably adequate "back-translation" (i.e., take the French, translate it back into English, and put quotes around it. The chances of such a sentence being Townshend's actual words is close to zero, but it's better than nothing.) For the French-challenged, the translator's proposed back-translation was: "If one name remains from the entire history of rock'n roll in a hundred years time, look no further, it will be that of Jimi Hendrix."
Pete Townshend, guitariste des Who
Taking up the challenge, I hit Google with the following query:
"if only one name" Townsend Hendrix
I hit the jackpot, with the following:
"In the whole history of rock'n'roll, even if only one name does survive, don't ask, it will inevitably be Jimi Hendrix."Now, leaving aside the possibility that the owner of the website may have either made up the quote, or misquoted it, or whatever, what I found interesting was the fact that I have been happily living my life for the past <mumble> decades under the impression that it was Peter Townsend who played with Roger Daltrey, et alia. But it turns out that his actual name is Peter Townshend.
Peter Townsend (The Who)
I got the right answer with the wrong query.
It turns out that if you query Google with
Townshend "The Who"
and then again with
Townsend "The Who"
you find they coexist in about a 3-to-1 ratio, which is to say that one in four Web references to The Who's lead guitarist are wrong.
Amazing.
I would not have mentioned it, except that I just got through inserting a photo in a PowerPoint presentation for one of the store's customers, when I noticed a reference to "Zig Zigler" in the text. Now, I've read most of Ziglar's books, which I why I know that his last name is spelled with an 'a' and not an 'e'. So I took the liberty of making the change (No Internet Required™).
The name next to Ziglar's was that of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. I looked hard at that spelling and hit Google again, and at first, I thought my initial gut feeling was right: it was "Rosalyn," wasn't it? There's a whole bunch of hits that say so.
Then I noticed that the second hit on the list spelled the name with one 'n' in the page title, and with two 'n's in the body. I repeated the exercise with Google, searching for hits on
"Rosalynn Carter"
and
"Rosalyn Carter"
With the quotes (so that the search looked for the two words as a single string), "Rosalynn Carter" shows up about 6400 times, while "Rosalyn Carter" yields almost 2000 hits.
Yikes! That's worse than Pete's percentage.
Interestingly enough, if you just look for the two words
Rosalynn Carter
and
Rosalyn Carter
you find the former nets 10,400 hits or so, while the (apparently wrong) second alternative weighs in with almost 15,000 hits!
What's with this? Are such misspellings of "people of celebrity" common? Is there anyone else you can think of who must go through life knowing that a goodly chunk of "the public" can't get their name straight?
For example, let me experiment with the query Abraham Lincon...
...um, 1,040 hits, as of today.
A quick survey of the first couple of pages of hits finds most of the errors occur in page titles (i.e., it's "Lincoln" in the body of the page), or are individual typos. Also, many occurrences of "Lincon" occur on Spanish pages (e.g., "A Abraham Lincon, presidente de los Estados Unidos de América"), though a search on Lincoln presidente yields about 26,000 sites, the first page of hits for which are all in Spanish.
Clearly, something is wrong with "Lincon," but unless you question the results Google spits back out at you, it would seem that "Lincon" is a perfectly acceptable way to spell Honest Abe's name, no?
As interesting as this line of thought may be, it's now getting pretty late. You get the idea, right?
Cheers...
P.S. I would never have hit a search engine to check the spelling of PT's name. I simply knew it was Townsend. Period. End of discussion. :^)
