{"id":523225,"date":"2010-04-11T09:31:03","date_gmt":"2010-04-11T13:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2242"},"modified":"2010-04-11T09:31:03","modified_gmt":"2010-04-11T13:31:03","slug":"beowulf-burlington-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/523225","title":{"rendered":"Beowulf Burlington forever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Six of us &mdash; three philosophers, two linguists, and a mathematician &mdash; were having dinner the Caf&eacute; Noir in Providence on Friday night, and when three of us decided on the excellent boeuf bourguignon, someone at the table told a story of a colleague who tried to include the phrase <I>boeuf bourguignon<\/I> in a word-processed file and found that the spell-checker recommended correcting the spelling to <I>Beowulf Burlington<\/I>.<br \/>\n<span id=\"more-2242\"><\/span><br \/>\nWe all giggled happily, and referred to the dish as Beowulf Burlington for the rest of the evening, but later (cursed as I am with the habits of a scholar) I checked with Microsoft Word on a Mac, and it proposes no such thing (though it does, rather in a rather desperate list, suggest correction <I>boeuf<\/I> to either <I>beau<\/I>, <I>beef<\/I>, <I>beefs<\/I>, <I>beefy<\/I>, <I>bogus<\/I>, <I>bough<\/I>, <I>bout<\/I>, or <I>pouf<\/I>).  Google doesn&#8217;t offer the alleged correction either, of course (there are hundreds of recipes for the beef dish in question).  <\/p>\n<p>I sometimes wonder if we aren&#8217;t doomed to a future of suspiciously implausible and uncheckable <A href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cupertino_effect\">cupertino effect<\/A> stories forever &mdash; an endless series of newly invented spell-checking chestnuts, false but enjoyed too much to be checked up on or rejected, like Eskimo words for snow, or the old story about the <A href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/001715.html\">preposition-stranding correction<\/A> that <A href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/002670.html\">Churchill almost certainly never made<\/A>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Six of us &mdash; three philosophers, two linguists, and a mathematician &mdash; were having dinner the Caf&eacute; Noir in Providence on Friday night, and when three of us decided on the excellent boeuf bourguignon, someone at the table told a story of a colleague who tried to include the phrase boeuf bourguignon in a word-processed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523225","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\/4148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}