The Impressionist often tears out what remains of his hair at the misuse of the eenglish as she is rited.
Ryme (rhyme),
it's (as in «in its own right»),
your (as in «you're late»), or
chrismas (just who exactly was chris?), and on and on - expose the authors' lack of care, or worse.
The credibility of pieces that otherwise seem informative and which are penned by people who are clearly not idiots is severely dented by these lapses. But now The Impressionist has found a hint as to the origin of some of these slips ...
Recnet rsearech at an Elingsh uinervtisy has sohwn taht it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aeappr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers are in the rghit pclaes. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it ealisy. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ecah lteter but the wrod as a wlohe.
Come to think of it, this only explains some of the typos. The rest is down to the creeping loss of precision in all things. So many pieces are published nowadays that each carries little or no importance. It doesn't matter what you say any more, just whether it has the right keywords to rank highly in the search engine results. Garbage can easily have a better rating than genius.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote in
Labyrinths in 1962 of a fictional library, the
Library of Babel, which contains all possible books consisting of 410 pages, each page having 40 lines of 80 characters. The narrator and his friends spend their lives wandering through this library and speculating about its contents. Is the cure for cancer contained in one of the books? Or the result of the next world cup?
One problem is that no book is more reliable than any other so there will be a book that says Brazil will win the next world cup. And another that says it will be The Faroe Islands. There is a book that consists of 410 pages of the phrase «this book is tripe» repeated over and over. That book may be more reliable.
We are on the way to building the Library of Babel. It is known as the Internet and it conforms to the maxim that more is better. The Library of Babel shows us that this is just not so.