I spend a lot of my time at work - such as now - looking up contact info and such on Google. Usually it's clients or vendors, but not always...
A week or so ago I took a call from a newspaper reporter, who wanted to know the correct spelling of a place mentioned by one of our agents in connection with a classical music package. The agent wasn't there, so I pulled up Google. The place was Ile Ste-Hélène. The reporter evidently had Google in front of her also, but couldn't make sense of what she saw. In sans serif lettering, it looked like lle Ste Helene. She couldn't figure out what "LLE" stood for.
"It's Ile Ste-Hélène," I told her, and spelled it (without the accents). "It means St. Helen's Island." She thanked me and hung up.
Is it unreasonable of me to feel that a newspaper reporter should have been able to figure this out without consulting a travel agency bookkeeper?
Karen
You are looking at an archive edition of 
5 years ago
3 comments:
Karen,
You are now a reporter's resource. Possibly she was on deadline and couldn't focus on the data, or she wanted to be sure.
I think the reporter was having a brain glitch, been stressed and busy. Even so, it's hard to see the place name "Ile Ste-Helene" as an unfathomable mystery. --KFB
That's what curmudgeonly, yet omniscient, copy editors are for!
Seriously, the reporter's desire and ability to divine the meaning of the vexing "Ile" would likely depend on a couple of things: her interest in the subject matter and her eye for foreign languages. Maybe she wasn't interested in the subject. Maybe she was ignorant of French and couldn't connect "Lle" with "Ile" and "Ile" with "Isle."
Verdict: Unreasonable. But that doesn't make you a bad person.
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