Haiku

This is my favorite one.  I heard it a few years ago:

I don’t like haiku

Because you can only use

Seventeen syllab

“Ug! Rent!”

I have three words for you, lady who sent that email:  Spell. Check. Er.  Now, I usually don’t get all fussy about it and fret, as would some of the real old guys I am related to, that the Mother Tongue is in irreparable disarray.  My dad was downright curmudgeonly about it, before he retired.  He used to whip out his red pencil and mark up his company’s printed monthly newsletter with carets and lines and arrows and corrections in the margins, and forward the corrected copy via interoffice mail to the Senior Vice President of whatever department was responsible.  Dad was a Senior Vice President of something else, which is how he could pull this off without consequences.  And my Uncle Bob, who by the way worked on the Shortridge High School (Indianapolis) daily newspaper with Kurt Vonnegut way back in the day (how cool is that?!), is a little bit of a language purist, too.  He wrote and edited for years for the Phoenix Sun and the L.A. Times, and was more recently a freelance editor for Arizona Highways magazine and the publisher/editor/chief cook and bottlewasher for a small newspaper in Prescott, AZ.  And Uncle Fred (smart-alec extraordinaire!) was a technical writer for General Electric for many years.  I come by my love of language honestly.

And so at work sometimes I am “the English major” by reputation and by disposition (and by the fact that I have a B.A. in English).  I am not a perfectionist, and I make my share of blunders, but there are things, mostly born of carelessness, that stick in my craw.  Some of those things I file in a folder called “Correspondunce”.  Just the other day I received an email with the words “UGRENT REMINDER” in the subject.  (Complete with the gratuitous upper-case shouting).  This memo was sent to several thousand home office employees, but if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you exactly what the hell was being so ugrently conveyed.  Something about invoice processing I think, but I would not swear to it.  I just couldn’t get past the glaring typo, and my mind sped off on a tangent, conjuring up a Paleolithic landlord trying to get some deadbeat Cro-Magnon dude to cough up the vigorish on his monthly cave rental:

“Ug! Rent!”

“And Thag no get deposit back if make drawing on cave wall!”

Correspondunce.  More on that later.

Oh, hey.  It’s later right now, and I remembered something from a few years ago that made me laugh.  Our old mainframe-based email system had a feature that would automatically correct spelling errors according to some arcane non-context-sensitive linguistic algorithm.  A colleague sent an email demonstrating that no matter how foolproof you make something, the world can always produce a higher caliber of foolishness.  This fellow was trying to say “I apologize for any inconvenience” but his spelling was so far off the mark that the system autocorrected it to read “I apologize for any incontinence”.  We were all like “Baahahahaha!!” and “god damn it, peed on again…what the fuck, Barry?!”   Good times.