Date:    Tue, 26 May 1998 18:45:15 -0500
<br>From:    Thomas Creswell <creswell[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CROWN.NET>
<br>Subject: Re: new word: speako
<br>
<br>Mark Mandel wrote:
<br>
<br>> When you're dictating text to your computer with speech recognition software*,
<br> and you say "third person plural" and the
<br>> screen shows "third person pleural", what do you call this substitution of one
<br> real word for another? ("Pleural", with
<br>> "eu", is a medical term.) For something like a year, maybe longer, SR users
<br> and developers have been calling it a
<br>> "speako", on the model of "typo". I think "talko" was another candidate, but
<br> "speako" seems to have won out.
<br>>
<br>>        Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist : mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dragonsys.com
<br>> *   Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 796-0267
<br>>  320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02160, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/
<br>>            Personal home page: http://world.std.com/~mam/
<br>
<br>Ward Gilman and I have been collecting these from edited printed sources for
<br> some time. Our (personal? nonce?) term for them
<br>is "Spelchek error," on the theory that they most often occur in printed matter
<br> that has been subjected to a spelling
<br>checker, which accepts any string it finds in its dictionary, regardless of
<br> semantics.  Most frequent items are those
<br>involving peddle/pedal; rain/rein/reign, and the like--homophones.  My theory is
<br> that most publications have downsized their
<br>copyediting/proofreading departments, so that human eyes never or only cursorily
<br> check the printed text.  Whether the
<br>erroneous string is the result of writer ignorance or haste or keyboarder error
<br> is not ordinarily possible to determine.
<br>.
<br>
<br>Our term may not be appropriate in the case of unimaginative speech recognition
<br> software.
<br>
<br>Tom Creswell
<br>