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 The Moscow Times
 Wednesday, May 5, 1999

 VIEW FROM AMERICA: Grammar Bug Wages War On Ugly E-mails

 By Bob Hirschfeld
 Special to The Moscow Times

 A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and
 it is far more insidious than las week's Chernobyl menace. Named
 Strunkenwhite, after the authors of a classic guide to good
 writing, it returns e-mail messages that have grammatical or
 spelling errors. It is deadly accurate in its detection
 abilities, unlike the 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: 'You
 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?"

 A broker at Begg, Barow and Steel 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.'"

 Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect because it
 doesn't come as an e-mail attachment. Instead, it is disguised
 within the text of an e-mail titled "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 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." 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 i 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.

 Meanwhile, bookstores and online booksellers reported a surge in
 orders for Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style."

 Bob Hirschfeld, who enjoys receiving e-mails in plain English,
 lampoons the news at his web site, bobsfridge.com. He
 contributed this comment to The Washington Post.

If you get any of these messages ignore them and do not pass them on.