Amusing Closed-Captioning Cockup of the Day

God Bless CC, but especially the stenocaptioners, who are court reporters with special training who make the miracle of live-event CC possible.

Stenocaptioners are capable of writing at speeds of up to 250 words per minute, or even faster in short bursts, and they are the people who make sure that we the non-hearing aren't sitting at the table saying "what?... what?" while everyone else, who has heard Wolf Blitzer announce that the missles have been launched, are under it.

However, stenocaptioners may be heroic figures but they are still only human, and the combination of typing, the complex phonetic-sound-input-to-typed-English conversion process live CC uses, and good old human misunderstanding result in an expected number of errors. What is interesting is how many of them are unintentional howlers.

For example, in a news story about a very bad guy, a repeat sexual offender being released on parole despite every indication that he was unrepentant and would offend again, I learned that:

"...POLICE SAID THEY COULD NOT KEEP FERRIER IN PRISON ANY LONGER BECAUSE OF THE TIME HE HAD SVEND FOR SEXUAL OFFENSES...."

Bonus points if you know why "Svend" was a particularly unfortunate name to have been mistaken for "served" here in Canada...

(Good news is, Ferrier threatened a reporter's life the very night he was released, was back in a cell before daybreak, and is not contesting that he be sent back to jail.)

ronnie