The language of the Web 213
I am therefore pleased to see the arrival of satire, as a means
of drawing attention to the problem. Bob Hirschfeld’s newspaper
article, ‘Taking liberties: the pluperfect’,^28 is one such contribution.
In it he describes the deadly Strunkenwhite virus which returns
e-mail messages to their senders if they contain grammatical or
spelling errors. He explains:
The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout
corporate America, which has become used to the typos,
misspellings, missing words and mangledsynta xso acceptable in
cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said
the virus has rendered him helpless. ‘Each time I tried to send one
particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message:
“Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must
be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.”
I threw my laptop across the room.’His article concludes:
‘We just can’t imagine what kind of devious mind would want to
tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications’,
said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out
of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him
tied up for hours.It is good to see some artists coming on board. Turner prize nom-
inee Tomoko Takahashi has a Web project he devised to object to
the way software is imposing a ‘standardised corporate language on
to our writing’ while ‘subtly altering its meaning’. He calls it Word
Perhect.^29
Some degree of normalization is unavoidable in automatic in-
formation retrieval (IR), as US librarian and information scientist
Terrence Brookes comments:^30
Although IR searchers are said to be ‘searching a database’ or
‘searching for documents’, these metaphors obscure the reality of(^28) Washington Post, 2 May 1999, B05.
(^29) Seen at the online galleryhttp://www.chisenhale.org.uk/ch2.
(^30) Brookes (1998: 732), from which some of the following examples are taken.