Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Porgram* (for Program*)

There are 20 cases of porgram* in OhioLINK, which makes it a "high probability" typo for the word program*. The acronym PORG seems to have only two current meanings: "Portfolio and Operational Risk Group" and "Person of Restricted Growth." Since the first option is TBTB (too boring to blog) and I just recently blogged about midgets, dwarfs, and little people in general, I'm sort of caught short for something to write about today. Not to be disrespectful, but the euphemism "person of restricted growth" reminds me of nothing so much as the humorous challenge to political correctness embodied in the alternative expression "vertically challenged." According to Wikipedia, "The eupheme was originally a word or phrase used in place of a religious word or phrase that should not be spoken aloud; etymologically, the eupheme is the opposite of the blaspheme..." The original euphemisms were reserved for the names of various deities, such as Persephone, Hecate, and Nemesis. Today, most euphemisms are substitutes for either sexual/scatological terms or last year's lingo for minority groups. In any case, let's cut the carp and get with the program. There were six examples of this typo in my own catalog and I'll bet there are some in yours as well.

(Proserpine, the Roman analogue to Persephone, an extract from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 1873–77 painting, with Jane Burden Morris as the model, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol

2 comments:

Denise D. Green said...

I found more typos in my catalog with progam? leaving out the second "r".

librarytypos said...

Thanks, Denise. In fact, I did blog "progam*" a few years ago. See: "A wiki that lists past entries in this blog" under LINKS OF INTEREST.