Posts filed under “Books & Literature”
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: My English teacher says that William Shakespeare was hired to revise the Psalms in the King James Bible. She says we know this because Psalm 46 has the words “shake” and “spear” in it, and because “William Shakespeare” is an anagram for “Here was I, like a psalm.” I told my English teacher I think she’s a few curls short of a wig. But what do you think? —Sincerely, Sarah, Mrs. Choke’s Tenth-Grade English Class (written during detention).
Dear Madam: “William Shakespeare” is also an anagram for “Wipe malaria shekels,” which proves that the immortal bard was behind the introduction of quinine into Palestine. “A whelk pier’s malaise” proves that Shakespeare is to blame for the decline of the shellfish industry. “Awake! Shale imperils!” has a stark warning for us all about fracking. “Kill me, aphasia sewer”—well, Dr. Boli is sure he doesn’t have to tell you what that means. In other words, Dr. Boli thinks you were probably right about your English teacher’s wig. But it is not polite to challenge your teacher in class. The polite thing to do is to allow your English teacher to propagate falsehood unchallenged, and then, ten years later, write a snarky coming-of-age novel about it.
Incidentally, the Geneva Bible, which was published four years before Shakespeare was born (Dr. Boli has a facsimile on his lap right now), also translates those same Hebrew words as “shake” and “speare.” This proves that William Shakespeare was also the inventor of the time machine.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
DR. BOLI’S COLLECTION OF HANDS.
Perhaps you have a hobby that you never mention to anyone. Perhaps you fear that others might find it a little—what is the best term for it?—creepy.
Dr. Boli has a hobby like that. He collects hands.
Not just any hands. They have to be librarians’ hands, and Dr. Boli collects them from Google Books.
The scanning of thousands upon thousands of books is necessarily done in haste, and with a broad tolerance for error. Usually the librarian, or deputy sub-under-librarian, charged with the scanning is careful; but accidents do happen, and fingers are photographed.
Some of the images are wonderfully artistic—surreal and suggestive—like this blurred hand captured in the act of retreating from the camera. This image tells a whole story, rich with metaphor, about the half-seen truths of other people’s lives, the things we glimpse only occasionally and very briefly before the veil of conventional behavior falls over them again.
More often, though, what we see is just a finger or two in the corner of the image, often in vivid color, because librarians wear brightly colored finger shields when they scan old books, and apparently Google’s algorithms trigger full-color mode when they detect color content in the image:
There seems to be another algorithm that attempts to blur out these straying fingers, with different levels of success, as we see here, where the thumb is clearly visible but the fingers have been clumsily obscured:
Every once in a while, though, we get a magnificent full-page, full-color hand:
These are the rare moments of discovery that make Dr. Boli think life is worth the trouble after all.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
THE MOST MISSPELLED WORD: IS THIS OUR ANSWER?
Last month we spent some time trying to find the most misspelled word in the English language. After much effort by many contributors (to whom Dr. Boli is suitably grateful), we came to the tentative conclusion that the most misspelled word might be the contraction “you’re,” which is very often spelled “your.”
Our survey is slightly skewed, however, by the nature of the Internet itself. Though the Internet is indeed a democratic institution, where anyone can say anything, it is nevertheless true that a disproportionate amount of the writing on the Internet comes from either professional writers or amateurs who write regularly—bloggers, for instance. This is, in fact, merely a tautology: more of the writing on the Internet comes from people who write more. Such people, merely by exercising their writing ability so often, are bound to be better spellers than the general public, most of whom seldom write anything if they can help it.
Where, then, shall we find a good representation of the spelling habits of the general public?
The obvious answer is Craigslist. Here people who normally would not write if they could help it are motivated to write by greed or simple necessity. And we can take a general survey of Craigslist users’ spelling habits very easily, because the search engine is very simpleminded: it does not attempt to work around our misspellings the way Google does.
So we search for the common phrase “If you’re interested” in the Pittsburgh section of Craigslist, and here is what we find:
“if you’re interested”: 514 postings
“if your interested”: 625 postings
The misspelling is more frequent than the correct spelling in a representative sample of the general population. It should be noted, by the way, that Pittsburgh’s largest industry is higher education.
So are Pittsburghers unusually illiterate? Let us look at Mobile:
“if you’re interested”: 100 postings
“if your interested”: 185 postings
Detroit:
“if you’re interested”: 979 postings
“if your interested”: 1083 postings
Buffalo:
“if you’re interested”: 268 postings
“if your interested”: 345 postings
Baltimore:
“if you’re interested”: 478 postings
“if your interested”: 405 postings
Tampa:
“if you’re interested”: 925 postings
“if your interested”: 868 postings
St. Louis:
“if you’re interested”: 770 postings
“if your interested”: 660 postings
It would seem, therefore, that the misspelling and the correct spelling of “you’re” are almost evenly balanced wherever we look, and that if anything the advantage goes to the misspelling.
Do we learn anything useful from this observation, other than that despair is a reasonable response to any detailed observation of human behavior?
Perhaps not. But the next time you talk to a lexicographer who insists on “description, not prescription,” and scoffs at the idea that the educated, rather than the general public, ought to set the standard for English usage, challenge him to revise his dictionary to include “your” as the correct spelling of the contraction for “you are,” with “you’re” as an obsolescent variant. See if he is true to his principles.