Unfortunate algorithms
Atom is a format design to provide “feeds” from blogs–short excerpts and headlines pointing back to the original posts. (RSS is another, competing, format.) When it comes time to actually program the software to produce the feed from the blog post, one of the decisions the programmer has to make is where to cut off longer headlines. In the case of this post from OxBlog, the programmer apparently chose to just chop it as soon as some character limit had been reached, leading to the following headline in the feed:
“THANKS ANYWAY, I THINK I’LL OPT FOR TELLY AND A HO…”
Of course, despite the popularity of Rap music in Britain^1^, there are probably comparatively few English speakers who would say both “telly” for television and “ho” for ladies of negotiable affection, but it still gave me pause.
The actual headline, by the way, is “THANKS ANYWAY, I THINK I’LL OPT FOR TELLY AND A HOT-WATER BOTTLE.”
How much harder would it have been to program the feed to either proceed to the next word break, or back track to the nearest prior? It seems particularly silly since the program adds the ellipsis, and those three characters would have been more than enough to complete the word.
p. 1 - at least popular enough for British Home Office Secretary David Plunkett and Culture Minister Kevin Howells to denounce it last year.