The dangers of Auto-replace...

The story below got me thinking... How often do I 'default' to a position on some issue or another without giving it any thought? I fear that there are times when I don't even consider what is at stake, I simply make up my mind because I believe something to be this way and not that way...

Anyway, this must have been a rather embarrassing mistake for the onenewsnow network. It made me chuckle!

The funny people who run the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site are so frightened of gays that they've set up a filter to change every instance of the word "gay" to "homosexual."

And while they may have fixed this particular instance, it looks like they haven't gone back through their archives and corrected other articles where this happened, such as this article where professional basketball player Rudy Gay is referred to as "Rudy Homosexual."

The Dangers of Auto-Replace

Comments

[Steve Hayes]

Don't tell me about it!

I once made a contribution to a book edited by Prof Adrio Konig of Unisa. The book was called Initiation into theology: the rich variety of theology and hermeneutics, and my contribution was on the theology of African Independent Churches. Adrio Konig was quite a meticulous editor, and, as a professional editor myself, I was impressed by his attention to detail, and thought this book would appear with no typos whatever. One thing he kept nagging me about was that he thought "African Initiated Churches" was more politically correct than "African Independent Churches", but I said that I used the two terms to mean slightly different things, so he shouldn't meddle with them. When the book was finally published, he (or someone else) had had a rush of blood to the head, and done a search and replace to change "Independent" to "Initiated", even in contexts where it made no sense whatever (including the title of one of the books in the bibliography). It was so garbled that I never mention that contribution in my CV, or anything like that, and found it altogether embarrassing. But it was strange that someone who seemed to pay such attention to detail could ruin it all in one massive rush of carelessness.

Even worse was the lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Unisa who realised that "Fundamental Pedagogics" had become politically incorrect, and revised his study guide by the simple expedient of replacing it with "Philosophy of Education" in every instance in which it appeared. The text was garbled to begin with, and that turned it into word salad -- he didn't read the result to see that he had left "pedagogical" in contexts where it made no sense whatever.

Political correctness in language is indeed a trap for the unwary.