Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.inglese
Titolo: BBC Article: Bringing mistakes to book

The issues having been presented on this newsgroup many times, and the
undersigned being particularly inept when dealing with matters of both
spelling and punctuation, I thought this might be of interest to others
touching, as it does, on subjects such as technological advances, spelling,
usages in the publishing world etc.
**
Bringing mistakes to book
Doris Lessing must wait for a reprint to correct errors
By Megan Lane
BBC News Online, Tuesday, 29 October, 2002
Doris Lessing has complained of falling standards in the publishing world
after finding mistakes in her latest novel. Despite technological advances,
why do clangers still appear?
There's a doozie in Dickens. A gaffe in Golding's Lord of the Flies. A
series of slip-ups in Sherlock Holmes, and howlers in Harry Potter.
Yet who could say that these are shoddy novels? A mistake here, an
inconsistency there do not a bad book make.
Doris Lessing, for one, does not approve. The 83-year-old novelist has
complained that her latest book contains errors; mistakes that were not
picked up in the editing process.
Ms Lessing puts this down to cost-cutting and job losses in the publishing
world. Instead of the "dragons" of yesteryear, whose sole task it was to
tighten prose and spot wayward characterisation, she says today's overworked
editors merely make suggestions about punctuation.
But mistakes are nothing new, be it a confused plot line or a typographical
error, the likes of which rendered one of the 10 Commandments "Thou shalt
commit adultery" in a 1631 edition of the King James Bible.
Errors get through in other media too. Witness the Guardian's corrections
column, so renowned for its entertainment value that the broadsheet put out
a book of favourite mistakes in 2000.
It has been known for the odd spelling mistake to appear in articles on BBC
News Online. The beauty of the internet is that once a slip-up has been
spotted, it's never wrong for long - simply correct and republish. In
newspapers and books, however, an error is there to stay.
Curse of spell check
Automation has done little to help.
Just as calculators have been blamed for the youth of today's inability to
do long division, computer programs have been linked to falling standards in
spelling and grammar.
The rise of hurriedly written missives, such as e-mails and text messages,
has played a part; so too have the myriad rules and exceptions in the
language itself.
Simply running spell check over a document will pick up any misspelled words
(so long as these are gobbledegook rather than real words) and any basic
grammatical errors.
Such checks may be sufficient for a report, an essay, a business letter or
e-mail, but editing a book requires considerably more finesse.
A sentence construction highlighted as incorrect by a spell check program
may in fact suit the tone of the novel; but an adjective inadvertently
repeated within the same paragraph will not be flagged up. Nor will a
character inexplicably changing eye colour between one chapter and the next.
Don't spell, freespel
One solution could be to free up the rules on spelling, says Richard Wade, a
retired broadcaster who is campaigning to make English easier to read and
write. After all, more than one-tenth of English words are not spelled the
way they sound.
Germany has already led the way with its own controversial spelling reforms
aimed at making German a simpler language to learn.
On his website, Freespeling.com, Mr Wade suggests simple shortcuts such as
dropping the silent "b" in "debt" and replacing the "ph" in photography with
"f".
His goal is to allow users to vote on how to spell tricky or illogical
words, and assemble the results into an online dictionary.
After an initial round of voting earlier this year, his supporters chose new
spellings for 15 words including "frend" and "hite" for friend and height. A
second round of voting is now under way on words such as through and
embarrassment. Polling closes on 30 November.
"We should be working towards a consensus to spell for the comprehension,
clarity and comfort of the reader," Mr Wade says.
Purists like Ms Lessing beg to differ. Rules is rules, after all.

 ...
Thru and nite, among others, already made it into the Merriam-Webster
dictionary, and probably also other American dictionaries. Perhaps it
is only a matter of time until the British follow suit, more's the
pity.
If many changes such as "frend" and "hite" are made, how will people
in fifty years yeas be able to read books published yesterday and
earlier?
---
Xakero