This time by Ben Zimmer, over at the Visual Thesaurus, link).

quote:

A commenter on a post of mine at Language Log provides an authoritative debunking:

Google "cronkiter" and you'll find all hits are in English. Smells of myth. I, Swede, 66, multilingual professional translator, have never seen or heard that word in any language. I'm afraid (read: convinced) that Mr. C is totally unknown by an overwhelming majority of Swedes.

I'm sure it won't kill this meme, but it's nice to see another bug squashed.

I also liked reading about the search and replace of "Cronkite" with "Mr. Cronkite" so that in the Chicago Tribune's original online version of Cronkite's obituary apparently (see the Language Log article) phrases like these appeared: "Walter Mr. Cronkite" or "Kathy Mr. Cronkite."

That happened at my place of work once...on a very big printing job of multiple issues of a large document. Since our boards are in states or territories or the District of Columbia, the preferred term is "jurisdiction" rather than "state." Therefore they did a search and replace of "state," replacing it with "jurisdiction." Since the name of our organization has "state" in it, and every page had our organization's name on it...well, you can imagine what happened and the cost must have been enormous.

I'd seen it before and I think it's been mentioned here, but I think the funniest example of over-enthusiastic Search-and-Replace use was

quote:

a conservative Christian news site managed to change the name of sprinter Tyson Gay to "Tyson Homosexual."

Oh, yes, that's hilarious!

And who can forget Cornelia Otis Skinner's Our Hearts Were Young and Homosexual.

Or of course "Honor Thy Father" by Homosexual Talese

Here's an opposite example:

www.mediabistro.com — gaytravels.jpg Michael Luongo , author of the "first-ever gay book to have been translated into Arabic," just had his travel book's title translated into a derogatory Arabic heading: "Pervert Travels in the Muslim World." Luongo's original English title was " Gay Travels in the Muslim World ," ...

If I ever get sore muscles, I am not getting touched by Ben-Homosexual.