If there’s one thing I have always strived to achieve with this column, it’s to someday get through my first sentence without having to stop to ask myself a question like, “Wait, is it ‘strived,’ or ‘strove?’ Or maybe ‘striven’? It can’t be ‘stroved,’ can it? ‘Strought?’ ”
Thankfully, with the Internet, I don’t have to wonder for long. A few keystrokes and mouse clicks takes me directly to a page where it definitively states that, “To unlock your sexy potential, seamless push-up bras or barely there tops offer provocative cleavage or a deeper plunge.”
Whoops! It appears that when looking for a solution to my grammatical dilemma I mistakenly stumbled upon the Victoria’s Secret Web site. Purely by accident, I assure you. However, as luck would have it, visiting this page did help me discover the answer to my question, which turns out to be, “Let the copy editor worry about it.”
This example notwithstanding, I’m often amazed by the near-instantaneous access the Web provides to virtually any information. This certainly wasn’t the case when I was a kid, when my friends and I, despite our youth, would debate the most pressing issues ofthe day, such as the Camp David accords, or the gas crisis. No, wait, we mainly argued about minutiae like which Red Sox player had the best batting average against left-handed pitchers or which of the Tuscadero sisters Fonzie dated first on the TV show, “Happy Days.”
Today, the Internet would have the answers immediately, but back then our only method for resolving disputes involved brawling until someone wound up pinned on the ground. At this point the pinned individual (usually me) would see the light and admit that, gee, maybe Pinky Tuscadero was on the show before her sister, Leather, particularly if this admission meant not having to eat any more dirt. (Coincidentally, this was also how Jimmy Carter resolved disputes between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at Camp David.)
This schoolyard-style approach to information dissemination had its flaws, however. For example, back then the received medical wisdom was that eating Pop Rocks and drinking Coke would cause one’s stomach to explode. We knew this to be true because that’s what killed Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials.
Today, a quick Internet search reveals that this piece of childhood lore was hopelessly inaccurate. Mikey wasn’t killed by eating Pop Rocks and drinking Coke — it turns out that he died as the result of a bizarre murder-suicide pact with Cousin Oliver from the “Brady Bunch” and “Leave It To Beaver” ’s Jerry Mathers.
Ha! I’m kidding, of course. Everyone knows Jerry Mathers died from choking on the ham sandwich he was sharing with Mama Cass. But the sad fact is that despite the hype, the Internet is not exactly a wholly unimpeachable source of unvarnished truth.
Much of the blame is directed at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia consisting of entries created and edited by volunteers whose credentials are unknown. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia’s entries feature accurate information, critics still carp about rare minor errors, such as a mistake in the dates of some obscure 12th century pope’s reign, or when former Vice President Dan Quayle was described as “a carnivorous fungus subsisting primarily on dung-borne nematodes.”
These inaccuracies aside, there’s no question that the Internet has heralded a revolution in how we access information. I do admit to feeling a little jealous of today’s kids, though. I suspect that, as a kid, if I’d had the Web to consult, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten beat up so often over trivial issues like which NBA player had the biggest afro.
Instead I would have gotten beat up for having a computer. Or is it “beaten?”
Examiner columnist Malcolm Fleschner always scrupulously checks his columns for factual errors. This one has 17 of them.
