{"id":482790,"date":"2010-03-28T11:26:37","date_gmt":"2010-03-28T15:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2212"},"modified":"2010-03-28T11:26:37","modified_gmt":"2010-03-28T15:26:37","slug":"mangling-the-prostidude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/482790","title":{"rendered":"Mangling the prostidude"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press<\/a> reports:<\/p>\n

\n

America’s first legal gigolo leaves rural brothel
\n<\/strong>
\nLAS VEGAS \u2014 America’s first legal male prostitute has left a rural Nevada brothel after a two-month stint that generated plenty of attention but fewer than 10 paying customers.<\/p>\n

Brothel owner Jim Davis said Friday his Shady Lady Ranch had parted ways with the nation’s first “prostitude.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Prostitude<\/em>? Really? That caught the eye of Amy West, who read the wire story in The Boston Globe<\/a> and posted about it on the American Dialect Society mailing list<\/a>. Amy rightly suggested the blend should be prostidude<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

You can easily find reporting on the prostidude<\/em> or prosti-dude<\/em>, including local coverage from The Las Vegas Review-Journal<\/a>. Some news outlets even managed to correct the AP story by using prostidude<\/em> instead of prostitude<\/em>, like The Nevada Appeal<\/a> and The Globe and Mail<\/a>. Cheers to them. But jeers to syndicators of the wire story who either repeated the error or compounded it, Cupertino-style<\/a>.\u00a0 CBS News<\/a>, The Canadian Press<\/a>, and several others<\/a> must have run the AP’s prostitude<\/em> through their spellcheckers and miscorrected it to prostitute<\/em>, resulting in this surprising sentence:<\/p>\n

\n

Brothel owner Jim Davis said Friday his Shady Lady Ranch had parted ways with the nation’s first prostitute.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So much for the oldest profession!<\/p>\n

There’s another Cupertino error that results in prostitute<\/em>, by the way. Here’s something I wrote in a 2005 post<\/a> on spellchecker miscorrections (before I knew that this phenomenon had been dubbed the Cupertino effect<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

Back in 1996, this example was noted by a contributor to the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<\/span>This happened a few weeks ago to the menu of a well-to-do restaurant here in San Francisco. \u00a0The menu was spell-checked, printed, and a copy displayed in the window of the restaurant (as is the custom here). Nobody noticed that the spell-checker turned “warmed spring salad greens with prosciuto” into “warmed spring salad greens with prostitutes.”<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I’m guessing that the restaurant menu actually had singular prostitute<\/span> in place of the intended prosciutto<\/span> (or prosciuto<\/span>, if the writer missed the extra t<\/span>) \u2014 amazingly enough, the custom dictionary in my copy of MS Word accompanying Office XP still doesn’t recognize the spiced Italian ham and suggests prostitute<\/span> instead. (There’s a Sopranos<\/em> joke in there somewhere.) Others have fallen prey to the same unfortunate replacement, as in this recipe appearing on a message board<\/a> for Italian food:<\/p>\n

<\/span>Crumble bread sticks into a mixing bowl. Cover with warm water. Let soak for 2 to 3 minutes or until soft. Drain. Stir in prostitute, provolone, pine nuts, 1\/4 cup oil, parsley, salt, and pepper. Set aside.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press reports: America’s first legal gigolo leaves rural brothel LAS VEGAS \u2014 America’s first legal male prostitute has left a rural Nevada brothel after a two-month stint that generated plenty of attention but fewer than 10 paying customers. Brothel owner Jim Davis said Friday his Shady Lady Ranch had parted ways with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6574,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-482790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6574"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}