Oops
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Oops. In this hour of Radiolab, stories of unintended consequences.
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We're going to start the show with this fellow. His name is Ben Zimmer. He's the on-language columnist for the New York Times Magazine because we figured since we wanted to do a show called Oops. We thought we should call Ben and so he came into the studio and he brought with him a bunch of his favorite Oops as an example. I just wanted to give one of my favorite examples of the first one that he hit us with began its life. Was it in an AP news article? Well it was an AP story but the AP story was fine when the AP story appeared on a news site from the American Family Association. Which by the way is a conservative Christian group. The headline first of all said homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials. Well if you read on if you're confused by that headline Barry here's how it starts. Tyson homosexual easily won his semi-final for the 100 meters at the US Olympic track and field trials and it goes on to say you know throughout the entire article you know on Saturday homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat. The entire article had the word homosexual in place of gay. The sprinter's name is Tyson Gay. According to Ben this is a classic, classic example of a search and replace Oops. This group apparently did not like the word gay. Because gay makes homosexuality sound very nice and very gay. So what they did was they ran a search and replaced every instance of the word gay with the word homosexual but then you get Tyson Gay becoming Tyson homosexual. This was just a one that they were a little careless with. Just to be fair here's a contrasting example in 1990 the Fresno Bee ran an article about the Massachusetts budget crisis and it made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts quote back into the African American and they had to issue a correction saying it should have said back in the black. No this one might have been a newsroom prank we're not sure. But it didn't get into the paper. Just for the hell of it here's one last one this one happened after the famous broadcaster Walter Cronkite died. When the Chicago Tribune did their online obituary for Cronkite what happened was every instance of Cronkite got replaced by Mr. Cronkite. You can understand the thinking behind that they deciding okay for deceased males they should be referred to with a title mister. But then what this turns into is an obituary where it says he was born Walter Leland Mr. Cronkite Jr. And it refers to his radio show Walter Mr. Cronkite's 20th century it's got things about his family his son Walter Mr. Cronkite the third his daughter his daughter Kathy Mr. Cronkite. On this episode of Radio Lab four oopses starting with a tree then we've got a goose and an entire town and a Harvard professor that really went oops now we should just say before we start oops oopses oops can be a misleading term really what we're talking about here is something Greek you try hard to prevent one thing and then you get exactly what you didn't want to get back at you right and our first story falls into that category back a few seasons ago we were doing a show on deception and we ended up talking with a professor yes named Ruben Gore hello hi is this professor girl yes speaking he's a psychiatrist works the University of Pennsylvania and I'd call them to talk about his research on self-deception it's fascinating stuff and I'm not gonna go into it now because somewhere along the way the conversation took a really weird turn no oh yeah get out yeah and it happened when he began to tell me about some studies range studies done by a what was the guy's name his name he's hanging on I don't remember it was his name Henry Murray and the reason we want to hear about Henry Murray is what I built it up don't you want to know more like yeah no tell me why okay I'm gonna let
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Oops. In this hour of Radiolab, stories of unintended consequences.