NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/folklore/urban/32409

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-02 | 1.6 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Dale Tanigawa)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: African-American-top
Date: 2 Jan 1993 13:51:37 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <mjenkins.725757417@cunews>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hardy.u.washington.edu

In article <mjenkins.725757417@cunews> [e-mail] (Michael Jenkinson) writes:
>My father told me about a colleague who was writing a book. The editor
>of the book was very PC and decided that the professor couldn't use
>the word "black" when referring to African-Americans. So the editor
>simply used a "search-and-replace" command to search for every "black"
>reference and replace it with "African-American."
>
>Unfortunately, this resulted in "blacktop" (as in asphalt) becoming
>"African-Americantop", a "black-and-white issue" becoming an
>"African-American-and-white issue", etc.

The Seattle Times carried a similar blurb in its "humorous asides" section
where they reported that another newspaper (don't remember which one) had
printed a correction, saying that the phrase "back in the African-American"
was supposed to be "back in the black" (talking about the economy or
something like that).

I also saw a Seattle Times correction to the effect that "yesterday Harbor"
was supposed to be "Friday Harbor" (an actual place name) and that the
error was introduced by a search-and-replace operation in editing a story
for a later edition of the paper.