{"id":2335,"date":"2016-11-14T22:33:44","date_gmt":"2016-11-15T04:33:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/?p=2335"},"modified":"2020-11-25T11:21:31","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T17:21:31","slug":"beware-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/effective-writing\/beware-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our Virginia: Past and Present<\/em> is a fourth-grade history textbook that was in wide use in Virginia\u2019s schools until a few years ago. Then it was found to be rife with misspellings and blatant falsehoods, such as: The Confederacy consisted of twelve states (actually eleven). The United States entered World War I in 1916 (it was 1917). These are bad enough. But to assert that African American soldiers fought for the South in large numbers during the Civil War is a lie that trivializes slavery.<\/p>\n

When did schools become facilities for poisoning children\u2019s minds with disinformation?<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s explanation: she did her research on the Internet.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a foolhardy move, as I recently found out firsthand.<\/p>\n

I wanted to use a quotation by Mark Twain, which I thought went like this: \u201cThe difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.\u201d This version is endorsed by numerous online \u201cauthorities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Right before my deadline, I just so happened to pick up Dick Cavett\u2019s book Talk Show<\/em>. I was amazed that four pages in, Cavett ran the same Twain aphorism, except that his version was different\u2014and, as it turned out, correct. Here it is: \u201cThe difference between the almost right word and the right word is \u2026 the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning<\/strong>.\u201d I still had time to make the change, but I was shaken.<\/p>\n

I had it backward: \u201cbetween lightning and a lightning bug\u201d was the way I\u2019d always heard it, and it never occurred to me there was anything \u201coff\u201d about it.<\/p>\n

I typed four words into my search engine: \u201cMark Twain \u2018The difference\u2019 \u201d and immediately saw page after page of websites featuring the quote, exactly as I\u2019d remembered it\u2014in other words, exactly wrong<\/em>!<\/p>\n

I went to a slick-looking site called quotationspage.com, which had it wrong. Iwise.com, an elaborate, visually striking site, loused it up. Thinkexist.com, whose motto is \u201cFinding quotations was never this easy,\u201d blew it. Great-quotes.com, with its many sponsors and high production values, botched it. So did Progress.org, with its Twain page by author Norman Solomon. (Solomon went on to write The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media<\/em>. Now that\u2019s an irony Twain would appreciate.)<\/p>\n

These were all impressive websites with an aura of authority, and they were all wrong about something that should be easy to get right\u2014a famous saying from an illustrious American writer. The Internet will get you if you don\u2019t watch out\u2014or maybe even if you do.<\/p>\n

\u2014Tom Stern<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our Virginia: Past and Present is a fourth-grade history textbook that was in wide use in Virginia\u2019s schools until a few years ago. Then it was found to be rife with misspellings and blatant falsehoods, such as: The Confederacy consisted of twelve states (actually eleven). The United States entered World War I in 1916 (it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-effective-writing"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2335"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}