Surely the spirit of Bennett Cerf would be rolling over in his grave if he basically tried to read anything these days.
The epoch (spelled correctly here) of the Printed Word is truly crashing down around us.
During the height of the Age of Wordsmithing which, arguably, I feel might best be placed somewhere in time around the middle of the last century (ie the time of Bennett Cerf) the written word was incredibly respected. Whole teams of personnel would be tasked with the grueling, yet essential job of proof-reading items for publication to weed out typos, misspelling, and other such grammatical errors. Whether the maker of these printed words was a newspaper, magazine or book publisher, it didn't matter. All regarded their duty to put out to its readers an impeccable product of quality and pride.
But then came the internet. And in its early days, it was regarded as a less-professional environment, the proving ground for geeks and freaks. Respectable news agencies and publishers downplayed the internet's capabilities assuming it could never replace newspapers, books or even broadcast television. If an established media producer in the early 2000s set up a website, they treated it like a red-headed step-child and so its quality suffered.
Well now the internet has surpassed the old-style media yet the bias continues. I'd noticed this for years. Respected periodicals like the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and well-known television networks such as CNN and NBC have slowly started seeing the light and have upped the stake in their internet based media but it still lacks the pristine quality of their more traditional forms of communication. Their websites still, quite regularly have typos, misspellings and botched grammar. I've just learned to live with this fact and I've hoped that since essentially we are all still in the early days of this relatively new medium, we are apt to have our growing pains to endure.
But now I wonder. Perhaps the problem is bigger than I'd assumed. Tonight I was reading the print version of this month's Popular Mechanics, a long-respected publication owned by Hearst Media. Page 17 was a full-page ad for a cookbook produced by a fellow Hearst publication which is also highly regarded: Esquire. In the copy, I read the following sentence:
"Whether they're cooking breakfast for a houseful of weekend guests, producing an apic spread for the playoffs, or planning a backyard BBQ."
The sentence has an incomplete quality since it references the cookbook and its application as a tool for inspiration which is stated in the sentence just prior to this one. But that's not my gripe with it. (Since if it were, the sentence I just wrote would fall under that same character. And, for that matter so would these two. But I digress.)
The problem is the word "apic" which is not a word at all. It's a misspelling of the word "epic." And here's the scary part - I have the feeling it's not simply a typo. I think the copy writer actually spelled it that way on purpose.
I've seen it a lot, especially among the millennials. They spell phonetically. A lot. And sometimes not just obscure, archaic or so-called "five dollar" words. They misspell simple words. And especially those which are factually spelled non-phonetically.
It figures, of course. They're a generation brought up with "Hooked on Phonics" and their classroom iMacs had automatic spellcheck. They probably never took a course in business letter writing, they copy and pasted entire essays and live in a culture of relaxed standards in written communication in general. There's is the generation which adopted texting abbreviations and made them commonplace like LOL, IDK, and WTF. The really lazy ones can avoid writing entirely and just go with speech recognition software and apps. And then there's auto-correct.
The hilarious film "Idiocracy" is looking more and more each year I live like an actual precognition of how the future is destined to be. With each crumbling piece of civilization like the evidence I moan about in this post, we are one step closer to watering our crops with Gatorade and ridiculing anyone who can read at greater than a 5th grade level by calling them a fag.
The epoch (spelled correctly here) of the Printed Word is truly crashing down around us.
During the height of the Age of Wordsmithing which, arguably, I feel might best be placed somewhere in time around the middle of the last century (ie the time of Bennett Cerf) the written word was incredibly respected. Whole teams of personnel would be tasked with the grueling, yet essential job of proof-reading items for publication to weed out typos, misspelling, and other such grammatical errors. Whether the maker of these printed words was a newspaper, magazine or book publisher, it didn't matter. All regarded their duty to put out to its readers an impeccable product of quality and pride.
But then came the internet. And in its early days, it was regarded as a less-professional environment, the proving ground for geeks and freaks. Respectable news agencies and publishers downplayed the internet's capabilities assuming it could never replace newspapers, books or even broadcast television. If an established media producer in the early 2000s set up a website, they treated it like a red-headed step-child and so its quality suffered.
Well now the internet has surpassed the old-style media yet the bias continues. I'd noticed this for years. Respected periodicals like the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and well-known television networks such as CNN and NBC have slowly started seeing the light and have upped the stake in their internet based media but it still lacks the pristine quality of their more traditional forms of communication. Their websites still, quite regularly have typos, misspellings and botched grammar. I've just learned to live with this fact and I've hoped that since essentially we are all still in the early days of this relatively new medium, we are apt to have our growing pains to endure.
But now I wonder. Perhaps the problem is bigger than I'd assumed. Tonight I was reading the print version of this month's Popular Mechanics, a long-respected publication owned by Hearst Media. Page 17 was a full-page ad for a cookbook produced by a fellow Hearst publication which is also highly regarded: Esquire. In the copy, I read the following sentence:
"Whether they're cooking breakfast for a houseful of weekend guests, producing an apic spread for the playoffs, or planning a backyard BBQ."
The sentence has an incomplete quality since it references the cookbook and its application as a tool for inspiration which is stated in the sentence just prior to this one. But that's not my gripe with it. (Since if it were, the sentence I just wrote would fall under that same character. And, for that matter so would these two. But I digress.)
The problem is the word "apic" which is not a word at all. It's a misspelling of the word "epic." And here's the scary part - I have the feeling it's not simply a typo. I think the copy writer actually spelled it that way on purpose.
I've seen it a lot, especially among the millennials. They spell phonetically. A lot. And sometimes not just obscure, archaic or so-called "five dollar" words. They misspell simple words. And especially those which are factually spelled non-phonetically.
It figures, of course. They're a generation brought up with "Hooked on Phonics" and their classroom iMacs had automatic spellcheck. They probably never took a course in business letter writing, they copy and pasted entire essays and live in a culture of relaxed standards in written communication in general. There's is the generation which adopted texting abbreviations and made them commonplace like LOL, IDK, and WTF. The really lazy ones can avoid writing entirely and just go with speech recognition software and apps. And then there's auto-correct.
The hilarious film "Idiocracy" is looking more and more each year I live like an actual precognition of how the future is destined to be. With each crumbling piece of civilization like the evidence I moan about in this post, we are one step closer to watering our crops with Gatorade and ridiculing anyone who can read at greater than a 5th grade level by calling them a fag.