Almost fifteen years ago now (which doesn’t seem possible, but the timestamp doesn’t lie) I achieved a very, very minor form of Internet fame by discovering and naming a feisty embuggerance: a Google Scholar search result that is embuggered by the automatic metadata extraction. This one was so thoroughly embuggered that it took a four-word sequence (Embuggerance, Escalate, Feisty, Holistic) from an unrelated article, reimagined it as the name of two authors for a book review on the same page, and hence: Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47. Sure enough, it’s still there, all these years later. It’s just a thing that happens sometimes with automation, not a fatal flaw with Google Scholar or anything like that.
Just today I encountered another similarly-embuggered authorship:
Been, What Might Have. “5Uyaqum Igai, An Indigenous Yugtun Writing System.” Exploring and Expanding Literacy Histories of the United States: A Spotlight on Under-Recognized Histories (2024).
Part of me wishes there were some neo-Puritan naming practice so that there could actually be a What-might-have Been out there writing articles. But it is probably fairer to the actual authors, Phyllis Morrow, Casey Jack, Montana Murphy and Joevahnta Usugan-Weddington, who are discussing the history of the Yugtun / Yup’ik writing system used in southwestern Alaska. In fact, however, it’s just part of the subtitle of the article: “What Was and What Might Have Been”. Poor Dr. Was didn’t even get a credit this time, leaving Dr. Been as the sole attributed author.
Incidentally, the 5 at the start of the title is a different kind of error – it’s the chapter number, appended wrongly in the actual printed text to the name of the writing system, Uyaqum Igai, which was named after its inventor, Uyaquq.
Glossographia 