The Cupertino Effect - watch your spell checker!

[tedster]

What is the Cupertino Effect?

In the early days of spell checking, the word "co-operation" was included in the electronic word lists but not "cooperation", without the hyphen. Type the word without the hypen and the first suggestion was not co-operation, but Cupertino, a city in northern California.

And thus the name of this "effect" - which can result in a really wrong word in your copy or headline, sometimes hilariously or embarrasingly wrong. Jay Leno's "Headlines" feature on US television gets a lot of mileage out of Cupertino Effect errors.

Sure enough, there are dozens of Cupertinos to be found in online documents from the UN, EU, NATO, and other international organizations. “The Cupertino with our Italian comrades proved to be very fruitful,” a German NATO officer was quoted as saying. Meanwhile, the EU’s Scientific and Technical Research Committee proposed “stimulating cross-border Cupertino.”

...It’s best to heed the warning given by the Denver Post after it was embarrassed by an errant spellchecker:

One sympathetic journalism expert said yesterday that spellcheck can be an editor’s enemy, “as Voldemort is to Harry Potter.” Or as our spellchecker would have it, “as Voltmeter is to Harry Potter.”

[blog.oup.com...]

Thanks to Ben Zimmer of the Oxford University Press for this entertaining article.

[ronin]

Can't stand document-scanning spellcheckers. Never used 'em.

[vincevincevince]

Ive virtualy perfect spelling and grammer even without a spelling checker, however were this not the case Id use one and carefully check wheter I agreed with each suggested spelling. When I saw 'cooperation' flagged with a suggestion of 'Cupertino' Id almost certainly know this to be incorrect.

I suspect that the problem lies with those who select Standard English spelling checkers out of anti-Amercian zeal and a false believe that they can write Stanard English and then proceed to type in American English wondering why they keep getting picked up on sepellings such as 'analyze', 'color' and indeed 'cooperation' (pronounced coop-er-ation when hyphen-free; meaning the gaining of residence within a coop)