Cupertino effect
The Cupertino effect is the tendency of a spellchecker to suggest inappropriate words to replace misspelled words and words not in its dictionary.
The origin of the term is that the spelling "cooperation" was often changed to "Cupertino" by older spellcheckers with dictionaries containing only the hyphenated form "co-operation".[1] (Cupertino is the home of Apple Inc., and thus its name would be a commonly misspelled word.) Users sometimes clicked "Change All" without checking whether the spellchecker's first suggestion was correct to begin with, resulting in even official documents with phrases like "as well as valuable experience in international Cupertino"[2] and "and reinforcing bilateral and multinational Cupertino and assistance actions."[3] Other examples include "South Asian Association for Regional Cupertino" and "presentation on African-German Cupertino."[4]
The term "Cupertino Effect" is then more generally applied to any failure to check that the suggested word is appropriate. A common case is "definately" being changed to "defiantly" instead of "definitely". Benjamin Zimmer of Thinkmap, Inc. and the University of Pennsylvania has collected many examples of similar errors, including DeMeco Ryans as "Demerol" (in the New York Times), Voldemort as "Voltmeter" (in the Denver Post) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement as "Muttonhead Quail".[4]
More sophisticated techniques for spell-checking in modern programs mean that the effect is much less of a problem than it used to be.
It has been said[5] that a possible misspelling that produced the Cupertino effect is "cooperatino". A member of the European Union translation service reports that the Cupertino change can happen to the word "cooperation" if the word processor's custom dictionary only has the hyphenated form "co-operation", and this was verified to have occurred using the spellchecker on an older version of Outlook Express.[6] Cupertino has been lurking in Microsoft's custom dictionaries since at least 1989 (when Word 4 for Mac was released). [7]
References
- ^ "When Spellcheckers Attack: Perils of the Cupertino Effect", OUPblog, Oxford University Press, November 1, 2007.
- ^ Cooperation Between India And South Africa In The Wider Interests Of Indian Ocean Region And The World
- ^ Report on meetings of the Deputy Ministers of Defence
- ^ a b New Scientist reference
- ^ "The Cupertino effect", Language Log, March 9, 2006.
- ^ "The Cupertino effect strikes again", Language Log, October 2, 2006.
- ^ http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002911.html
External links
- The word: Cupertino effect, New Scientist (subscription only; hard copy in issue of December 1, 2007, p.62)
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