Wyn Drabble: Gobbledegook spells fun ...

Wyn Drabble.

Into my inbox came an email with an offer of help. It offered to find and fix any errors in my writing: it would spy on my spelling, purify my punctuation and make good my grammar. What fun, I thought!

You see, I work on the premise that computers cannot think. Granted, they can do an awful lot of mechanical stuff but they lack the brain power required to manipulate concepts.

A computer is a little like the misnamed Mastermind in which the contestants don't need to use concepts and cross-reference ideas - they just need to KNOW stuff. Not that some of that stuff isn't amazing and it makes me very aware that I know stuff-all. But it's knowing rather than thinking. To me, a mastermind thinks rather than just knows.

Nowhere is this computer shortcoming illustrated more clearly than in the area of computer translation services. The results are generally gobbledegook because thinking is required. Throw the technological translator an idiom and it will give back garbage. "That gets my goat" might be translated into another language as the equivalent of "that fetches my horned ruminant".

Anyway, it was free so I joined up and gave the San Francisco-based service a little test. I made up a sentence with three intentional errors in it. It reported back on only two of them.

My sentence was, "Its thanks from my wife and I for meeting that criteria." (Try it yourself. The correct version is at the end.)

You probably know me well enough to believe I emailed them at once with my first impressions of their service. Their reply was prompt.

They told me that the sentence did indeed contain three errors but when they tested it on one of their computers, their service found all three. "We could not reproduce your result at our end," they said.

I had to take their word for it but it left me wondering why, on my computer, it fell short. That said, Grammarly.com certainly offers a valuable service which would be a great help to many people. It would correct "amount of people" to "number of people", for example.

It would insert the "l" into vulnerable which increasingly, in both print and pronunciation, becomes "vunerable".

To those who use "verse" as a verb ("Who is your team going to verse this weekend?"), it would point out that "versus" is a preposition meaning "against", that you can't "verse" anyone.

And it would add the essential hyphen to "Students off to help cyclone hit Fiji".

Last week I also received another email from a reader. Again, it was language-based but it was rather more fun.

The only reason I can think of to use phrases such as "key deliverables", "rationalised footprint" and "expectation-reality mismatch" is to mock corporate gobbledegook. Now, there's a website you can visit which will create your own splendid examples of such nonsense.

All you have to do is type in a business name and it will create risibly exaggerated corporate-speak. I gave myself a suitable name and it offered: Drabble Media Thingie has permanently altered the idea of e-tailers. Do you have a plan of action to become wireless? Think granular. A company that can aggregate courageously will (someday) be able to reinvent elegantly. The networks factor can be summed up in one word: scalable. The e-markets factor is killer. We will add to our capacity to expedite without lessening our ability to productize. Think end-to-end. Your budget for incubating should be at least three times your budget for disintermediating.

Have fun. It's http://www.andrewdavidson.com/gibberish/?companyname=ABC

Footnote: The correct version is, "It's thanks from my wife and me for meeting that criterion." Well done, fellow pedants.

- Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.