Date: Thu, 5 May 94
From: RISKS Forum <risks@csl.sri.com>
Subject: RISKS DIGEST 16.03

RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Thursday 5 May 1994  Volume 16 : Issue 3

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Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 15:10:22 -0700
From: Phil Agre <pagre@ucsd.edu>
To: risks@csl.sri.com
Subject: spelling correction

We've had plenty of notes about spelling correctors, but I find this one
particularly interesting.  The otherwise excellent April 1994 issue of Z
Magazine contained a particularly horrible editing error in an article by
Sara Diamond about the "American Center for Law and Justice" (ACLJ).  The
ACLJ was created by conservative Christians in order to oppose the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in court cases over issues like school prayer.
Everyone has assumed that the similarity of acronyms is deliberate; ACLJ
seems part of a fairly systematic conservative strategy of positioning
public-interest groups as "liberal" by creating conservative mirror images
of them.  Well, as the Z editors explained in their May issue, their spelling
correction program included ACLU but not ACLJ, with the result that every
instance of "ACLJ" in Diamond's article got changed to "ACLU" except, somehow,
for the very first one, which occurred (much as it does above) in parentheses
after the first mention of "American Center for Law and Justice".  Apparently
there was an uproar, with some Z readers calling up the ACLU to ask why it had
suddenly reversed its positions.  The risk is subtle: in politics, things are
often designed to outwardly resemble their opposites, or to invite confusion
or sharply defined contrast (or both) with their opposites.  As a result,
it becomes impossible to define "close enough" in (for example) a spelling
corrector without a great deal of specific background knowledge.

Phil Agre, UCSD