Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Top 6 Mistakes on C-SPAN's Closed Captioning of the Inauguration

Hooray, America! And, as I was reminded watching C-SPAN on a Jumbotron, hooray C-SPAN for having 30 years of coverage! (Did you really need to leave that on while actually historic things were happening?) But most of all, hooray for whatever robot or idiot was doing the closed-captioning, because there is nothing more satisfying than watching a huge crowd laugh at a serious event because somebody was screwing up. Also, there were so many mistakes that there's no way I could get all of them, so feel free to submit your own if you were watching the Jumbotron or captioned C-SPAN at the time.

6. "Thy kingdom come, the will be done"

Note that I said "robot or idiot" in the prologue to this. That's because, well, what actual person wouldn't recognize this phrase, right? The Lord's Prayer has to be one of the most frequently-recited bits of English--how could you screw this up? It has to be some voice-recognition program, right? On the other hand...

5. "We have brought unnecessary change to Washington."

This one--what was really said was "a necessary change"--sorta convinced me that the captioning guy was in fact a guy and had an agenda.

4. "Senator Joseph R. Brighton"

You'd really think that the program or person would recognize the second-most important name in the ceremony today. You'd be wrong.

3. "A rock Hussein Obama"

You'd be very, very wrong.

2. "Land of teh pilgrim's pride"

A typo is a little pedestrian and nitpicky, but that doesn't change the fact that imagining Aretha Franklin using "leet" is hilarious.

1. "We can be sure that Dr. King and a great cloud of witnesses are shopping in heaven."

Rick Warren actually said "shouting," but I think we can all agree that this image is better.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

there was also "Christians and Muslims, Jews and Dues" instead of "Jews and Hindus", which is what Obama actually said.

Sarah said...

Also, I'm pretty sure Obama took a "growth."

Sarah said...

Also,

HEAVEN SALE!! EVERYTHING MUST GO GO GO!!!!

Rob said...

Nice catches, all.

Anonymous said...

Cool! Did you know an hour of captioning equates to over 10k strokes on a steno machine? How long would your blog pages flow if you listed all the words that were correct? Thanks for sharing your favorite six.