Sentence structure

Well, we can dream, can't we?

====



By Bob Hirschfeld
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 2, 1999

 A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and it is far
more insidious than last week's Chernobyl menace. Named Strunkenwhite
after the authors of a classic guide to writing, it returns e-mail
messages that have grammatical or spelling errors. It is deadly accurate
in its detection abilities, unlike the dubious spell checkers that come
with word processing programs.

The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America,
which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and
mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an
Internet startup, said the virus has 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
set 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,
10-10-10-10-10-10-123, said: "This morning, the same damned 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?  Whoever created this
virus should have their programming fingers broken."

A broker at Begg, Barow and Steel said he couldn't return to the "bad,
old" days when he had to send paper memos in proper English. He speculated
that the hacker who created Strunkenwhite was a "disgruntled
English major who couldn't make it on a trading floor. When you're 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 timesaver.  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 they 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
spouses, parents, and stockbrokers.)

Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect because it doesn't come
as an e-mail attachment (which requires the recipient to open it before it
becomes active). Instead, it is disguised within the text of an e-mail
entitled "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 Strunkenwhite's mischievous
creator.

The virus also 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 speechwriting office reported that it had
received the same message, along with a caution to avoid phrases such as
"the truth is... " and "in fact...."

Home computer users also are reporting snafus, although an e-mailer who
used the word "snafu" said she had come to regret it.

The virus can have an even more devastating impact if it infects an entire
network. A cable news operation was forced to shut down its computer
system for several hours when it discovered that Strunkenwhite had
somehow infiltrated its TelePrompTer software, delaying  newscasts and
leaving news anchors nearly tongue-tied as they wrestled with proper
sentence structure.

There is concern among law enforcement officials that Strunkenwhite is a
harbinger of the increasingly sophisticated methods hackers are using to
exploit the vulnerability of business's reliance on computers.  "This is
one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we have
ever encountered. We just can't imagine what kind of devious mind would
want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications," said
an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern
that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for hours.