Cupertino in the wild? Octavia Butler "Adulthood Rites"

[dianora]

Octavia Butler is not a writer I have ever had a pressing need to read, but when partner and I were at a school book sale I bought it, as I had heard she was a good writer to read.
I suspect I entered the middle of a trilogy as I had to do a lot of guessing as to what was happening but nevertheless I was reading along until I came across this:

"They were siblings- Human-born and Oankali-born, The smaller one was Oankali-born and the more androgenous-looking of the two." g. 136 of my paper book copy.

This is an obvious typo or so it seemed. In this context the word should have obviously been "androgynous"
but the word "androgenous" does exist. From the Oxford https://www.oxfordreference.com, "Producing only male offspring. Often confused with androgynous, which has a different meaning and a different etymology. [From Greek andros a man + genes born or produced + -ous having or characterized by]"

So how does this happen? The obvious is she simply got the word wrong and no one caught it. Obviously a normal dictionary checker would have flagged it as an unknown word since it is quite specific to Biology.
But what if the spell checker was a better one which also included the esoteric (to us) word "Androgenous" ?
In that case a spell check would have simply not flagged the word and perhaps we have a *reverse* Cupertino effect? see http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002911.html

I am surprised no copy editor caught it.

Speaking of auto-correct this article insists auto-correct is making our spelling worse:

https://blogs.ubc.ca/aaronko/files/2020/08/Final-Project-Article.pdf

And this (from the Atlantic) insists it's not.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/auto-correct-not-ruining-spelling/327785/

You decide!

P.S. FWIW Dreamwidth spell check did not find any spelling mistakes.

Comments

[blogcutter]

I suspect auto-correct and auto-complete are only a small part of the total picture when it comes to any deterioration in our spelling ability. There's also modern pedagogy: do schools still teach spelling as a separate subject? Do they teach cursive writing? Do French teachers still give dictées? Then there's the psychology and brain processes of writing something longhand vs. typing on a computer keyboard - if you're writing by hand, studies suggest you have to think more about what you're doing and trying to convey and the learning is reinforced better, regardless of whether you have a proofreader or computerized auto-correct.

Our schools are more diverse and have many more ESL students than they once did, and they may well enrich our language as much as struggle to master standard English spelling.

Finally, spelling itself (along with grammar and other aspects of language) evolves over time, as I've noticed just in my lifetime: for example, we're losing hyphens, diphthongs, apostrophes and other intra-word punctuation. And of course, Canadian spelling to begin with is itself a weird hybrid of British and U.S. English, with numerous regional variations and other outside influences to boot.

If texting language, abbreviations, acronym, emoticons and the like are thrown into the mix, that of course opens up several more cans of worms!