GE - Fw: Check your gerunds at the door

[Carolyn Young]

My niece, Rebecca, sent this one.  Enjoy.

Caitlin, Carolyn


> A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and it is far
more
> insidious than anything else thus far. Named Strunkenwhite, after the
authors
> of a classic guide to good writing, it returns e-mail messages that have
> grammatical or spelling errors. It is deadly accurate in its detection
> abilities, unlike the spell-checkers that come with word processing
programs.
>
> The virus is causing something akin to panic throught corporate America,
> which as become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled
> syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of a leading Internet startup
> said the visur had rendered him helpless. "Each time I tried to send one
> particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: 'Your
> dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be st off by
commas,
> but one must not precede the conjunction.' I threw my laptop across the
> room."
>
> A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance company,
> 10-10-10-10-10-10-10-123, said: "This morning, the same e-mail kept coming
> back to me with a pesky notation claiming I needed to use a pronoun's
> possessive case before a gerund. With the number of e-mails I crank out
each
> day, who has time for proper grammar? What is a gerund, anyway?"
>
> A broker at Begg, Barow, and Steel speculated that the hacker who created
> Strunkenwhite was a "disgruntled English major who couldn't make it on a
> trading floor. When your buying and selling on margin, I don't think it's
> anybody's business if I write that 'i meetinged through the morning, then
> cinched the deal on the cel phone while bareling down the xway.'"
>
> If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a
> communication revolution once hailed as a significant time-saver. A study
of
> 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased
employees'
> productivity by 1.8 hours a day because the took less time to formulate
their
> thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of
productivity
> because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their reltives and
> stockbrokers.)
>
> Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect because it doesn't come
as
> an e-mail attachment. Instead, it is disguised within the text of an
e-mail
> titled "Congratulations on your pay raise." The message asks the recipient
to
> "click here to find out about how your raise effects your pension." The
use
> of "effects" rather than the grammatically correct "affects" appears to be
an
> inside joke from Stunkenwhite's mischievous creator.
>
> The virus has left government e-mail systems in disarray. Officials at the
> Office of Management and Budget can no longer transmit electronic versions
of
> federal regulations because their highly technical language seems to run
> afoul of Strunkenwhite's dictum that "vigorous writing is concise." The
White
> House speech writing office reported that it had received the same
message,
> along with a caution to avoid phrases such as "the truth is..."and "in
> fact..."
>
> Meanwhile, bookstores and online booksellers report a surge in orders for
> Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style." The slim book seems to be the
> only antidote to the virus.
>
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