The mystery is that we have no idea how it perpetuated itself but for the past two months people have been having a laugh at this blog for frequently misspelling Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s name. At a time when our readership had grown by more than 50 per cent, nobody bothered to tell us. And we have no idea how it happened. We do know that about two months ago, when we were adding some mega tags to the blog software, we somehow dropped the ‘U’ from the Premier’s name.
Mega tags are a system that speeds up search engines picking your blog by making keywords easier to find. And that might have been part of our blog’s rapid growth: other people who cannot spell ‘McGuinty.’
But we do know how to spell Dalton’s name and would hardly continue the error. Nor do we believe the WordPress software that we use for our blog can make auto corrections. It had to be MicroSoft’s word processor. MicroSoft has this convenient feature for people who cannot spell that will automatically correct a spelling error. While this sometimes leads to very funny errors in communications today, it really is useful when you are typing quickly. We blamed MicroSoft for the error until we checked and found that neither McGuinty nor McGinty were considered acceptable spelling. We found that even if we corrected the error on visual inspection, the system would still change it back. It was really tough and took quite a while to fix. We had to go back through two months of writing about Ontario politics and check every spelling of McGuinty’s name.
It makes you wonder what Mr. McGuinty ever did to Microsoft? Maybe he uses Apple?
But it is also the fault of our regular readers. When you add more than 100,000 words each year to your blog, you do not often reread it. We expect our readers to tell us when we goof. Some of them do, with obvious glee. Even the Babel Whigs, who consider our writings toxic—or is it us?—recognize that while we do not consider their leader in Queen’s Park to be perfect, he is far better than the alternatives. So pitch in please. Drop us an e-mail occasionally to let us know how we are doing. Tell us when we err.
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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry
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