Monday, March 9, 2009

Ecomonic (for Economic)

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable," according to John Kenneth Galbraith. We see from the news over the weekend that the economy is not the most important story - it is the only story. Some of what we saw reminds us of something we heard coming out of East Texas in the early 1930's. Someone called the theater and asked what time the movie would be playing. The answer was "What time can you get here?" Since the economy seems to have turned on its head, it seems appropriate to start this week with an inversion typo in the word "Economic." The truncated "Ecomon*" is found on the B list of Typographical Errors in Library Databases, now in its new home at www.terryballard.org/typos/typoscomplete.html
. That means that the mistake was found between 16 and 99 times in OhioLINK at the time of its discovery. This morning there were 21 hits for Ecomonic in OhioLINK. Google produced an astonishing 470,000,000 hits for the term. The correctly spelled word only got a few million more hits. Normally, we do not tell Google how to run their business, but something must be wrong here.
Today's image shows a protest in front of a Bank of Ireland branch in Tralee, County Kerry in 2003. The original can be found at http://www.pbase.com/terryballard/image/61085872.






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