Auto-correct?

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Mark Kinsler

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Dec 13, 2019, 8:47:49 PM12/13/19
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I'm still experimenting with Google groups here, so I'll post this from the group's website and then also from my home e-mail, which ought to work as well.

The experimental topic is auto-correct: for the last few weeks parishioners here, who are the most literate people I know, have been posting messages ornamented with odd errors--that is, words that are real words, but the wrong words.  Murr had 'regent' where he clearly meant 'reject,'  and their/they're/there has been committed by those who never used to.  While it's true we're all getting older, I wonder if auto-correct features have been slipped into our martinis or browsers recently. 

M Kinsler

Now, I replied by my home e-mail to what Dave posted about B-52 tires (I told him that N2 was probably used to prevent internal tire fires, which are undesirable on aircraft that carry  nuclear weapons), but my e-mail shows it only going to him, and it doesn't ---or hasn't yet--shown up on the google/htw website.  Has anyone else gotten it?




Evelyn Kinzel

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Dec 13, 2019, 11:49:18 PM12/13/19
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I haven't yet received your "I'm pretty sure . . ." or Bob Reite's "A valid reason for race cars . . ." (They appeared in Dave Typinski's "To be clear . . ." and "One could imagine . . ."
Evelyn
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Dave Typinski

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Dec 13, 2019, 11:55:04 PM12/13/19
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It came only to me, Mark. You gotta hit "reply list" instead of "reply".

If you remember, this is how it used to work with the old HTW list until Yahoo
screwed it all up by eliminating the possibility of replying directly to the
message's author.

BTW, would you please configure the new reflector to prepend the [HTW] tag to
the reflected emails' subject lines? I'm sure this can be done in Google Groups
because other Google Groups reflectors are set up that way.

I was wondering the same thing about the odd auto-correct stuff. New email
clients with overzealous auto correct? Or maybe the Google AI got loose and
it's auto-correcting everyone's emails as they pass through Google's mail servers.
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Dave
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Dave Typinski

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Dec 13, 2019, 11:56:14 PM12/13/19
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That's because I manually changed the "to:" field back to the list address on my
replies to these private massages.
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Dave
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Mark Kinsler

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Dec 14, 2019, 1:03:56 AM12/14/19
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[htw] should now be, uh, prepended to all messages from htw.  I'd never seen that word, but it makes sense.  I've been through all of the various options several times now and I _think_ I've got them right.  Let me know if I haven't. 

M Kinsler
512 East Mulberry Street
Lancaster, Ohio USA 43130
740-687-6368 or 740-503-1973
https://tinyurl.com/sxckd67 (Amazon author page)
http://www.mkinsler.com (seriously-neglected web page)


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Bob Reite

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Dec 14, 2019, 1:47:23 AM12/14/19
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Well, if I hit"reply list", it's now going howthi...@googlegroups.com

I'll have to see if my gmail login works for the group web site.
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Robert D. Reite
Telecentral Electronics, Inc.

Mark Kinsler

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Dec 14, 2019, 1:49:45 AM12/14/19
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Yay.  It seems like the new howthingswork works.  Thanks, everyone, for your continuing help.

Mark Kinsler
512 East Mulberry Street
Lancaster, Ohio USA 43130
740-687-6368 or 740-503-1973
https://tinyurl.com/sxckd67 (Amazon author page)
http://www.mkinsler.com (seriously-neglected web page)

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Dave Typinski

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Dec 14, 2019, 1:52:50 AM12/14/19
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Prepend is an old word that means to think about something. The newer
definition -- to add something before something else, chiefly in the computer
field -- began around 1980.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prepend&year_start=1800&year_end=2003&corpus=0&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cprepend%3B%2Cc0
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Mark Kinsler

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Dec 14, 2019, 1:56:38 AM12/14/19
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 And this is why everyone thinks I'm lots brighter than I am.  I shall adopt that word and pretend that I'm actually literate.

Mark Kinsler
512 East Mulberry Street
Lancaster, Ohio USA 43130
740-687-6368 or 740-503-1973
https://tinyurl.com/sxckd67 (Amazon author page)
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Nicholas Bodley

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Dec 15, 2019, 2:55:40 AM12/15/19
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Ah! Found "Reply all" /after/ swiping my scroll finger (n) times to go through the ridiculous sludge.

Good grief, Mark -- your weeklies are very literate; they have a nice style that reads quite effortlessly.

¶ (pilcrow) Re auto-correct: Logographic teaching in elementary school means that suggested candidate words that >appear similar< to the intended are probably selected, although in context they're likely to be wildly nonsensical.

One quite-literate occasional correspondent (not a subscriber, here) encounters a lot of absurdities in computer-proofread text. and he's Not Happy.

Fairly recently, I noticed frequent misuse of  "defiantly", not a common word, where the writer plainly meant "definitely". Seems quite likely that the writer typed "definatly", which means said person's English teacher failed to successfully point out the root "finite" in the longer word. "Finite" is a word used by the better educated, I'd say.

The poor miseducated souls, judging by >looks< of the replaced word, fail to note the "an"/"na" transposition. The words "Andriod/Android", and "Asteriods/Asteroids" for instance, >look< similar, but obliterating their phonetics makes the swaps accceptable by the sub-literate.

Plausible pronunciation of "Andriod" could be "an dree odd", and of "Asteriods", "uh steer ee odds".

Btw, the sub-literate are not necessarily lower-caste. Subliteracy affects all who were mis-taught. A candidate for Mayor of Waltham, a vivacious, intelligent, likable person, made an IMPORTANT ANNOUCMENT to a group of people.

ANNOUCMENT      uh 'nuke m'nt
ANNOUNCEMENT

— — —

SORRY FOR THE
INCONVIENCE      in 'con vee "ns"
Huh?
INCONVENIENCE

CONOLETION
COMPLETION

SUBCRITE
SUBSCRIBE

Japan has a recommended subset of kanji for everyday use, roughly 2,500 characters; Paul knows its size and name, but I've forgotten which — Tōyō(?), then Jōyō kanji? Not "ō's", just "o's"?.

Chinese (simplified, at least) has a set of roughly 5,000 hanzi (name equiv. to "kanji") for common use. More, because Japanese has two phonetic derivatives (and our alphabet).

Well, hardly to be outdone, Logographic English fanatics came up with an obscure, but quite likely excellent list of English logograms which should be quickly recognizable at 6th grade reading level. (Years back. our Army said all text for the troops must be at 6th grade level.)

The list was, and quite likely is downloadable, plain text, no JSON.

How many logograms in that listaaXQ, called "words"?
Sixty thousand.
Memory burden? Seems to me that spellings make no sense, absent understanding of their phonetic basis. Hope it's not really /that/ bad.

Not included are oodles of historical and geographical words and names. Wonder why those topics aren't taught much, if at all – teachers don't want to mangle names and words not in the ~60,000. 

When a victim of logographic misteaching tries to pronounce an off-list word or name, said person, with pitiful ease, is likely to sound temporarily brain-injured as well as distressed.

•=•=•=•=•=

Remember DuPont's Corfam™ (®? I rarely know which)? It was a synthetic sheet poromer, which had pores between its surfaces. Clever: First stage was to make an open mesh, maybe like a plastic pot-scrubber. Mesh was then filled with the end-product polymer, quite-different chemistry. Finally, the mesh was dissolved away, leaving pores.

For shoes, it kept inner humidity down, but, unlike leather, didn't re-shape in response to stress. Shoes didn't become more comfy after being worn for a while.

Topic change for a break...

But, a shoe salesman, when Corfam™ was new, tried to say it. and his severe struggle was something I still remember, decades later. It was much like the struggling kids of [Why Johnny Can't Read], the classic that's said to have infuriated Dr. Seuss, who's said to have scrapped fifty drafts of [The Cat In The Hat].

It recently occurred to me that failing to teach our phonetic basis is like teaching kids to use a calculator (or calc. app) while failing to teach numerical magnitudes of digits and numbers.
To be consistent, they would /not/ be taught to count objects, nor perhaps the digits in sequence by magnitude.

It seems to be a mystery how our minds, once taught our phonetic basis, transform to what's essentially logographic recognition, even groups of words. However, we're hugely more able to absorb words and (often) unfamiliar names.

Logographic teaching bypasses phonetics, and pupils typically make faster progress, but beyond third grade or so, they're handicapped.
It seems likely that human memory for word appearances, when they seem arbitrary, just fills up.

One last topic: It was only a few centuries ago that standard spelling was established; see, iirc, about Noah Webster. Previously, each person had their own way of spelling, which, of course, was phonetic. However, figuring out countless personal schemes was distracting. Advocates must have had other explanations, as well.
Reading literate text is like moving a warm table knife through butter.

I well remember reading much of Popular Mechanics mag. for Jan. 1905, archived by Google Books. While rather less educated in – what – vocabulary, than recent New Yorker issues, both articles and reader messages were totally literate. There were no "bumps in the road".

Mark, please holler if this is too long.

My best to all. : )

nb
quite sleepy


Nicholas Bodley

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Dec 19, 2019, 12:49:25 AM12/19/19
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Sorry, folks. At least, I did warn about the length of this. Been worrying about it being bad manners in a generally quite-tolerant environment. I think it could be edited into single-topic messages which would be posted separately.

I'm still on the warpath about teaching reading as if our language were logographic. The Brits also did it, but reacted with some new goofiness.
   Newer trends include omitting words, sometimes the key word in a sentence, but sometimes very short words, especially "of". Also, deprecation of grammatical number (singular vs. plural) and omitted grammatical endings. That last is strong evidence of "logographicness".

New realization as the degradation becomes worse is that flush right margins are now rare. They require splitting words at the ends of lines and hyphenating at syllable breaks, but splitting a logogram into widely-separated parts ist verboten.

Best regards,

nb

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