grammervirus

A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and it is far more insidious than
anything else thus far. Named Strunkenwhite, after the authors of a classic guide to good
writing, it returns e-mail messages that have grammatical or spelling errors. It is deadly
accurate in its detection abilities, unlike the spell-checkers that come with word processing
programs.

The virus is causing something akin to panic throught corporate America, which as become
used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in
cyberspace. The CEO of a leading Internet startup said the visur had rendered him
helpless. "Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error
message: 'Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be st off by
commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.' I threw my laptop across the room."

A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance company, 10-10-10-10-10-
10-10-123, said: "This morning, the same e-mail kept coming back to me with a pesky
notation claiming I needed to use a pronoun's possessive case before a gerund. With the
number of e-mails I crank out each day, who has time for proper grammer" Whe is a
gerund, anyway?"

A broker at Begg, Barow, and Steel speculated that the hacker who created
Strunkenwhite was a "disgruntled English major who couldn't make it on a trading floor.
When your buying and selling on margin, I don't think it's anybody's business if I write that
'i meetinged through the morning, then cinched the deal on the cel phone while bareling
down the xway.' "

If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a communication
revolution once hailed as a significant time-saver. A study of 1,254 office workers in
Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased employees' productivity by 1.8 hours a day
because the took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that
they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their
reltives and stockbrokers.)

Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect because it doesn't come as an e-mail
attachment. Instead, it is disguised within the text of an e-mail titled "Congratulations on
your pay raise." The message asks the recipient to "click here to find out about how your
raise effects your pension." The use of "effects" rather than the grammatically correct
"affects" appears to be an inside joke from Stunkenwhite's mischievous creator.

The visur has left government e-mail systems in disarray. Officials at the Office of
Management and Budget can no longer transmit electronic versions of federal regulations
because their highly technical language seems to run afouls of Strunkenwhite's dictum that
"vigorous writing is concise." The White House speechwriting office reported that it had
received the same messagge, along with a caution to avoid phrases such as "the truth is..."
and "in fact..."

Meanwhile, bookstore and online booksellers reporte a surge in orders for Strunk and
White's "The Elements of Style." The slim book seems to be the only antidote to the virus.