Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Typo brides and unacceptable downtown

Peter Porter's poem 'Brides come to the poet's window' presents the serendipitous typo; the first lines are:

Birds it should have been, but pleasure quickens
As the white and peregrine performers land -

Glancing at a recent paper called 'FISMA Compliance and Cloud Computing' I came across the following sentence ...

If the cloud goes down then organizations will have unacceptable downtown that their IT departments can not control causing a stop to the critical services that the organization uses to conduct its daily operations.

'Downtown' instead of 'downtime' suggests the malign influence of spellcheck. Nevertheless there is something poetic, in a sort of robotic or aleatoric way, in this language with its talk of clouds going down and downtowns that IT departments are unable to control.

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