{"id":17904,"date":"2019-04-09T21:31:48","date_gmt":"2019-04-10T04:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17904"},"modified":"2019-06-16T09:32:05","modified_gmt":"2019-06-16T16:32:05","slug":"plausible-typos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/04\/09\/plausible-typos\/","title":{"rendered":"Plausible typos"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Some typos are more harder to detect than others.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019m currently reading the 1989 Mandarin Paperbacks edition of C. J. Cherryh\u2019s novel Downbelow Station<\/cite>, which is rife with the sort of typos that a spellchecker won\u2019t catch, because the erroneous word is also a valid English word.<\/p>\r\n

(Okay, \u201crife\u201d is an exaggeration; I really only mean one every five or ten pages. But that still seems like a lot.)<\/p>\r\n

But the ones in this book are even worse than the usual run of such typos, because in this case many of them are plausible<\/em> substitute words.<\/p>\r\n

A couple of examples:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n
One of them objected<\/dt>\r\n
Probably was meant to say None of them objected<\/i>. (This one isn\u2019t an exact quote, \u2019cause I neglected to write it down when I encountered it and can\u2019t find it now.)<\/dd>\r\n
\u201cWe cope\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
Almost certainly was meant to say We copy<\/i>.<\/dd>\r\n
as she had always been with this father<\/dt>\r\n
Was meant to say with his father<\/i>.<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n

In all of those cases, not only a spellchecker but a grammar-checker would fail to catch the typo. It\u2019s the kind of typo that you can only recognize by first understanding the meaning of the phrase as written; second noticing that the meaning seems out of sync with what\u2019s going on, or unlikely to be said by that character; and third recognizing that a small change to one of the words would make much more sense.<\/p>\r\n

(And the issue is exacerbated in this book by the author\u2019s occasional penchant for unusual and slightly cryptic syntax, so some phrases that initially look like errors probably aren\u2019t.)<\/p>\r\n

This kind of thing is why I feel that we\u2019re going to continue to need human copyeditors, at least until the advent of strong AI. For that second example, I can imagine a nonsentient machine-learning system reaching the point of recognizing that \u201cWe cope\u201d is a less likely phrase than \u201cWe copy\u201d in dialogue over a radio between spaceships in a military-focused science fiction novel; I can vaguely<\/em> imagine something similar working for the third one; but I don\u2019t see any way for a nonsentient system to recognize that \u201cOne\u201d should \u201cNone\u201d in that first example.<\/p>\r\n

Hmm\u2014while I\u2019m here, let\u2019s make a game of it: Come up with a phrase or sentence or paragraph that includes a plausible typo\u2014an incorrect word that\u2019s only (let\u2019s say) a one-letter alteration of the right word, but that remains grammatically correct in its context.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,39,45,85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-errors","category-fiction","category-grammar","category-spelling-orthography"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17904"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17950,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17904\/revisions\/17950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}