I really must grade papers furiously today, because class meets tomorrow and I want to hand back the papers that have come in — and Margaret will be home for the weekend, huzzah!, so I won’t be spending a lot of time thinking about stacks of unmarked assignments. (It looks as though France 2 TV actually will come to St. Luke’s on Sunday to interview me — but that’s another strange story in the making.)
But before I resume my regularly-scheduled academic obligations, I was intrigued to notice that (a) Microsoft bandies around the word “trademarked” as casually as this — after all, isn’t restrictive intellectual property profiteering part of their business plan?* — and that on a Microsoft typography page, someone misspelled “ellipsis” five days ago, and it hasn’t been corrected since.
*I love the spin-control correction banner on that page, reminding readers not to call it Palladium any more, but NGSCB. OK, right.
Actually, the irony is even greater than you note.
Here’s the last sentence, with the misspelled word you note:
“It looks as if apostrophes were avoided in subsequent movies but all the texts include the series trademarked five dot elipsis ‘…..'”
Notice anything else? Like, for example, the missing apostrophe in “series,” which is being used in a possessive sense? In a sentence in which they’re talking about missing apostrophes? Somehow I doubt that it was an intentional typographic joke…