This has made my day.
In current affairs this morning — we spend half an hour each morning discussing the news — we were chatting about FairFax’s decision to axe a pub-full of sub-editors from some of its papers. This was in addition to yesterday’s news from the UK that City AM has decided to remove the subs’ desk altogether in a cost-cutting masterstroke.
Well the typo-ed Guardian article that I pointed out in that post shows that single humans can’t be trusted with subbing copy. And now some quite glorious proof that machines can’t be trusted with snubbing out errors either. This gem of an entry from the brilliant Regret the Error blog explains that the over-cautious chiefs over at OneNewsNow didn’t ever want to use the word ‘gay’ when referring to a homosexual. How best to achieve this small detail? Simple: Use a machine to change it automatically! Genius!
Genius, that is, until a rapid young chap named Tyson Gay won a race.
He suddenly became Tyson Homosexual when the site’s filter got a hold of an AP story. Boing Boing has a screen grab of the hilarity:
But perhaps the best part of the story was this:
Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: ‘A little fatigued.’
I don’t think this post needs anymore words, do you?
