Colllege Foootball

TigerBlog is not a great speller.

He likes to play the "Guess My Word" game every morning, which asks the player to guess a word and then keep guessing words before or after the previous one alphabetically until the word in question is guessed. TB often knows the answer but is spelling it wrong.

So for someone like TB, you'd think spell-check would be a good thing, which it usually is.

Except when it comes to the iPhone. Then it can be a nightmare.

Auto-correct, that is.

How many times has auto-correct changed something you've texted into a completely different word - and often - meaning, only you're moving too fast to realize it until after you've hit send, which means that you have to send another text message to correct the first, only auto-correct changes that one too.

It's one thing when auto-correct changes obscure or incorrect words to ones that are used all the time. But why change "food" to "good" automatically?

Or TB's biggest auto-correcting pet peeve, which is to change "were" to "we're" at the beginning of a sentence, which takes "were you at the meeting" and changes it to "we're you at the meeting."

On the other hand, TigerBlog always loves when he's typing - is it called typing when you're sending a text message on a phone? - and he has about eight letters out of place and yet auto-correct knows exactly what he meant to say.

Who came up with that? Who was able to program the phone to turn "Peubxwrib" and know that it's actually supposed to be "Princeton?"

TigerBlog wasn't at all bothered when he saw that the word "college" was spelled wrong on top of one of the dugouts at the College World Series.

Did you see this one?

It was spelled "Colllege," which three "Ls" instead of two. Actually, if you think about it, it's somewhat funny, spelling the word "college" wrong. TB saw one tweet about it that said "Most of us are going pro is something other than sports - like sign painting."

Okay, it's a bad mistake. And clearly someone - or multiple people - should have caught it.

And it clearly doesn't look good to have a gigantic misspelling on the top of a dugout at the premiere event for the sport.

Still, it happens. TB gets it.

He also wonders what the fall-out  was. He can just imagine the CYA-fest of blame deflection that took place after that.

TB remembers the time when one of Princeton's football opponents sent its preseason prospectus in the mail. TB is sure almost nobody still does the first or uses the second.

Anyway, this particular time, right there on the cover, was the name of the school and sport. Only one of them was spelled right. The other was spelled "Foootball."

TB gets that too.

TB makes all kinds of spelling mistakes. He even catches some of them.

Still, TB lives in fear of a colllege foootball-type situation.

It's particularly unnerving to send a game program to the printer. Well, actually the unnerving part is when it comes back from the printer.

TB is pretty sure one of these days he's going to see that he spelled the name of the opposing team incorrectly or, even worse, spelled Princeton incorrectly.

A college athletics website is a place for high levels of production. It's even more so at Princeton and in the rest of the Ivy League, where there are twice as many sports as at most places.

There are hundreds of articles on goprincetontigers.com each month, and it's impossible not to have a spelling mistake or two get out there. It's always going to happen.

Add to that writing a blog five days a week and the potential for error increases by some major factor of 10.

Aftr alll, ther arre tooo maney wrds too spll thm write ech tme.