In Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies, I tried to position myself as the Beavis and/or Butthead of the grammar world. It looks like I have some competition.
Wikipedia, in its entry for "Sentence," says under the subhead, "Components of a sentence":
A simple complete sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. The subject is typically a pornstar ...
And it gets worse. Here's the link.
I was so thrown that I actually looked up "pornstar," wondering if it was some linguistics term I didn't know. Nope.
I tried to fix it, along with some choice sentence examples that appear later in the piece. I can't. Wikipedia won't let me. Seems someone whose IP address is similar to my own -- i.e. issued by the same huge conglomerate that issues my dynamic IP address -- has given our IP address range a bad name.
Sure, they'll let in some schmuck who not only thinks it's funny to insert the term "porn star" but who can't even spell it.
But me, I'm just not Wiki-worthy.
Dillweeds, indeed, Mr. Butthead. Dillweeds, indeed.
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8 comments:
"GlitteratAE"?!
Oh, and I fixed the Wikipedia entry for you.
Someone must have been playing a joke on you. I just checked and the porn star has left the building.
It would have been funny to see.
Faldone:
1. Yup, that's how it was spelled. I figured it was a nod to Latin plural formation. But, having never studied Latin, I wasn't sure.
2. Thanks for fixing! I see you also caught the references to "69" and "horny." Fine proofreading work!
Wordacious: Someone was definitely playing a joke. But it wasn't on me. It was there for all the world to see. (I laughed in spite of myself.) Faldone fixed it.
Bless the truth-by-committee model that is Wikipedia!
I didn't get the 69 or horny. I didn't even read the entry. I just found the pornstar and fixed that. Somebody else seems to have fixed the other problems.
Weird! The plot thickens.
Thanks for letting me know.
This sort of vandalism happens all the time at Wikipedia. There are bots that alert editors to small changes with particular key words (perhaps the misspelling of porn star was intentional as in spam). Usually, bots or human editors simply revert the offending edit in toto, catching all the changes. It's almost as disturbing as the scanners' fingers on book pages over at Google Books (link).
I had no idea.
Big Bot Brother. Crazy.
Still, the authorities must do whatever is necessary to protect us from the F word. If the word "horny" appears in a Wikipedia entry, the terrorists win. (Well, unless it's an article about horny toads.)
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