Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Whose law is it, anyway?

Burke's Law? No, not that one.

Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror."

McKean's Law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error."

Skitt's Law: "Skitt's Law, a corollary of Murphy's Law, variously expressed as 'any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself' or 'the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.' The effect is, of course, magnified a hundredfold if the post is in reply to Skitt himself."

By way of a post at Language Log which settles the question of whether we are ignoramuses or ignoramii, and does it without begging the question.

Let's see, if every post with an error drew a post which had an error, which then of course would draw another post, which would also have an error, oh my! The next thing you know, all the pixels would be used up, and the Internet would implode, leaving nothing but email and a few listservs. Good for the old carbon footprint, I suppose.

I know why this post has an "SF" tag. Do you?
Update: Answer in the comments.

10 comments:

blake said...

SF for special forces? I figured you for a Green Beret!

Now, I'm scouring my post trying to find the spelling error...

Hector Owen said...

Did you click all the links?

blake said...

No...the McKean one hung up...hold on...

OK, yes.

SF...nope. (I'm gonna slap my forehead, aren't I....)

Hector Owen said...

Let's leave this open for another couple of days, before I give it up and reveal the answer.

Hector Owen said...

Oh, and — yes, you are gonna slap it hard.

blake said...

Speculative Fiction, I assume, and for some reason I'm thinking of Asimov but...

Hector Owen said...

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

That is not a hint. Just something I like to say, once in a while.

I use the word "just" way too often. But I fear that extracting it from my vocabulary might cause more pain than the result would justify. Oh, look! "Justify!" I can't get away from the darn thing.

Hector Owen said...

All right, that's long enough to wait. The name of the Sammy Davis Jr. character in the Burke's law clip is Cordwainer Bird, which was also the name of the writer of the episode, which was also the pen name that Harlan Ellison used for scripts that he did not want his own name on. Ellison wrote a lot of SF, so, there you are.

blake said...

DOH!

I didn't process the "Cordwainer Bird" on the Burke's Law YouTube clip.

[palm to forehead]

Hector Owen said...

Not that Harlan Ellison will ever read this, but I should not have spoken of him in the past tense. He's not dead, and indeed the whole world of SF is still waiting, though more patiently by this time than eagerly, for The Last Dangerous Visions, aka The Book on the Edge of Forever.