One for the pedants and purists.
The folks over at the oddly named (particularly for a firm wanting to make money from the shortcomings of others) spellr.us really do have a point – if the biggest and brightest universities can’t get it right, who is left that we can trust? Governments?
Though you would think that spellr.us, particularly seeing that they want to separate us from our hard-earned, would at least have a typo-free public face.
This Media Release has been circulating the web for the last couple of days:
13 of the World’s Top 20 Universities Misspell “University” on Their Own Website
Top 10 Most Commonly Misspelled Words. Sydney, Australia, July 7, 2009 – An analysis by enterprise website spell checking platform spellr.us has revealed that on average, 14.2% of web pages on the world’s most prestigious university websites contain at least one genuine spelling error.
The annual spellr.us Higher Education Online Content Survey found that these spelling mistakes ranged from obscure, easy to overlook slip-ups to obvious and embarrassing blunders.
The word “university”, for example, was misspelled by 13 of the world’s top 20 educational institutions . Other significant errors included Harvard Law School’s misspell ing of “professor” on a primary navigation menu , and Ivy League neighbour Yale University’s misspell ing of “Yale University”
Nice to see that even the mob at spellr.us can forget the odd hyphen and period from time to time…
You can see Kevin Garber, the founder of spellr.us in a rather smug little video here
2 Comments
The spellr.us folk may be spelling pedants, but their us of grammar leaves me uneasy. Take this sentence from their front page: “9/10 websites have spelling errors”. It took me a couple of seconds to comprehend what they were trying to say.
I see I just wrote “their us” instead of “their use”. Would their software have caught the error?