Perspect?
Searching for optoelectronics, I was directed to National Chiao Tung University. In the center of its introduction page popped up the word PERSPECT. I then emailed my friendly suggestion regarding this typographical error to the website manager on 9/18/04. Curiosity driven, I visited its English site and found several occurrences of the same mistake. The correct word in these contexts should be PROSPECT.
What negligence and indifference! There are, as usual, numerous grammatical errors in those writings. This was understandable and excusable, if the authors/editors used a less customarily used word (e.g., perspective). However, PERSPECT is a nonexistent word, and should have been readily captured by any spell-check tools if such tools were ever utilized.
It’s not my intention to pick on people’s writing skills. Should this error appear on an informal document, it could be overlooked. But to appear (multiple times!) on the main webpage of a (possibly) world-renowned research institute, that is embarrassingly different.
English is a confusing (and confused) language. Whether we like it or not, the world is stuck with it, especially in science and technology. As a pro bono service, I started writing a letter to President Chang (張俊彥校長), the educator whose mission is to bring NCTU to the next level. Unfortunately, many things happened between then and now, and I am sorry to report that, just as my letter is still under construction, PERSPECT is still…. there.
posted by Vigo Baby at
9:10 AM
1 Comments:
A google search for perspect comes up with quite many sites that use it as an abbreviation for perspective (e.g., in file names), and ... the NCTU site, which uses it as if it were a real word.
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