The Japanese word for mistype of a word someone intended to use, aka typo, is goji (誤字). It happens so often nowadays at least for me, partially due to Apple autocorrect: Apple thinks it's so smart knowing what us inferior humans want to say before we even say it, but sometimes it can lead to disastrous results. That's why I prefer to write these blogs on the good old word processor, because there was a reason I learned how to type fast when I was a kid, and there's no one to edit. I know what mistakes my hands usually make, and I know I'm making the mistake as I type it cuz I hit the wrong key and go back to fix it. On the phone a lot of times I type it, don't see the error, and the email already goes out.
Typos are so common nowadays due to smartphones now that they're part of society, we as a society has moved from frowning upon them to accepting them kind of as a cost of using technology, that we should just gloss over the obviously mistaken word and understand the meaning. Heck, the president of the United States makes these typo mistakes all the time, and it's not just "Covfefe!" (although that's the shining jewel of typos because it was the beginning of a sentence and just drifted out, ending in an awesome ending). I was going to go on another long rant about how typos are setting society backwards (worse than climate change!) and how all that training in grade school about proofreading our work and grammatical rules and using proper English just goes out the waste, but then I thought.........sometimes, we DO need typos to lighten the mood. Covfefe, as bizarre as it was and a continuation of the bizarre behavior of President Trump and his obsession with using Twitter to express his discontent and post policy objectives, was the least damaging of any of the mistakes he has made. It was a very human error, one we have all made before typing on our phones, and it turned out to be kind of funny. It made the 24 hour news cycle, it made the rounds of talk shows and tease-Trump memes, but in the end no one died because of it, no irreparable damage resulted, in fact it was a net positive: America and possibly other parts of the world got a laugh out of it without much expense .That's the type of thing we need sometimes in this heightened state of tension in America and the world, where we can't go a few days without mass violence somewhere in the world and political leaders enduring scandal. It's nice to be able to laugh at ourselves once in awhile. (Sure, Donald Trump didn't seem to laugh at himself and actually ordered Sean Spicer to claim that the President and a close circle people only knew what "covfefe" meant). I remember days of innocence when I made mistakes speaking to friends and they laughing because I said something weird, or I didn't know that a certain word had a sexual connotation like "grabbing the mongoose" or something, or "pink taco" (I just found out about this one recently). I often make mistakes speaking Korean and Japanese just due to not knowing the language well enough that elicit laughter from native speakers, but it's helpful, I learn more about the language and no one gets hurt, people get a laugh. Net positive. Let's hope things like "covfefe" are what allow people to bond together, share a laugh, and be able to not take themselves so seriously and laugh at themselves once in a while. (Unlikely for President Trump that he will admit to mistakes, though, unfortunately).
Also, another complaint by snarky Robert: stop ending one's sentences with "haha" or "lol." It's just not professional, witty, valuable, or in any way enhancing the sentence." Ending a Tweet, text, instagram post, email, or any other media with "haha" is just showing one's insecurity, like "oh I'm making this statement, but just in case you don't like it, I'll say haha to save my butt to play it off like I was joking." Or the whole sentence was meant to be a joke, but not funny enough that it speaks for itself, so you have to announce that the sentence was a joke to be clear. Neither of these are OK in my book, but the worst is when there's no obvious reason "haha" is even being used: the author is answering haha like a period, to end the sentence without feeling too lame (this applies when authors end sentences with "so" too by the way). It's just a continuing dereliction of the English language, and I urge humankind to dispense with this practice haha. (See how annoying that last word was? It's like the awkward Asian kid with glasses at a frat party, it just sticks out like a sore thumb. I know, I was that awkward Asian kid). I think I'm going to go proofread my own work on facebook posts now and blog entries including this one to eradicate all of the hahas and lols at the end of sentence.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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