OK, this is going to be the lamest pit rant EVAH, but I just have to know who the hell gets hired to do closed captioning, and is there a spelling test first?
I was at the gym this morning, pumping my little heart out on the elliptical trainer and watching closed-captioned news coverage of (what else?) the war on Iraq on the health club TV (while the Dixie Chicks crooned “Landslide” over the loudspeakers–I loved the irony). Some blurb about the U.S. forces having seized Saddam’s new palace . . .
. . . and then it happened.
Across the bottom of the TV screen scrolled a sentence about the [sic] lexyourious interior of Saddam’s palace.
Lexyourious.
LEX-fucking-YOURIOUS.
Honey, the English teacher in me went all a-twitch. I did a double take, squinting to make sure I was reading that correctly, and then apparently bellowed, “WHAT??!??!?!?!?” quite loudly (still staring incredulously at the television), because I attracted the attention of a couple of burly men who’d been making small talk over by the free weights, both of whom came dashing around the corner upon hearing my exclamation and skidded to a halt in front of the TV, no doubt expecting some shocking news about how Saddam was finally captured by U.S. troops and then unzipped his face to reveal that he is really Edith Bunker.
I think they decided that they must have missed whatever I’d been hollering about, and (luckily) didn’t ask me what had happened.
At any rate, I regained my composure, but holy cow! LEXYOURIOUS??? What, did the closed captioning guy call in sick and send his six-year-old Hooked-on-Phonics kid in to do his job for the day?
Let’s hope this person doesn’t volunteer to coach this year’s spelling bee.
Hardly lame, auntie em. I often find myself watching TV news with closed-captioning on and wondering why I’m unemployed while whoever does the on-the-fly captioning has a job. Lexyourious is the least of it.
I’m not unemployed (knock, knock) jayjay, but I had the same thought, first about people I know who are unemployed . . .
. . . and then I started wondering if this daffybits makes more $$$ than ME.
Typos I can understand. I don’t know how closed captioning works, exactly, but I imagine you’ve gotta type pretty fast, so I can forgive the occasional “hte” or “particualrly” . . . well, you get the idea.
But this is a clear case of Hooked on Phonics failure.
Anyway, hang in there, jay–you’ll find a job soon, and will impress everyone with your stellar spelling!
Our friend Auntie Em is now furious,
'Cause some TV hack typed, “Lexyourious.”
…That’s not much of crime,
…When one’s typing real time,
So we shouldn’t allow it to wourious.
For live broadcasts, such as news, the captions are added by a stenographer. IIRC, on a stenographer’s machine, you don’t type individual letters, but press combinations of keys to type syllables as they are spoken. Since it’s live, sometimes typos get through.
And thanks, friedo–I suppose I can forgive under the circumstances you described. But this lets me know that I could never be a closed captioning stenographer. It’d drive me crazy to put “lexyourious” on national television.
Feh. Have you ever watched “The Simpsons” with closed captioning? It’s AWFUL. And it’s THE SIMPSONS, man! They never have complete sentences or even intelligible English words.
It can be entertaining as hell to read while drunk in the bar, though.
The Simpons captioning awful? It’s one of my favourite parts of the show! I wonder if it’s different in different places, because it’s perfectly intelligible on my tv. The best part is that sometimes the caption will be a different joke than the one being spoken, so it’s like two - two - two for the price of one!
Lexyourious isn’t a typo. Lixurious or Lyxurious or Luxyrious maybe, but typos don’t typically involve adding letters to words for no reason whatsoever. that’s just sloppy, stupid, bad captioning, and dammit, deaf people deserve better.
But it doesn’t beat what someone did on the taped Katie Couric interview special last night, with the Trisha Meili, fka Central Park Jogger. As Katie did a voiceover of an excerpt of the jogger’s new autobiography, she read how jogging at night in the park gave Ms. Meili a feeling of solitude.
The captioning said that jogging gave Ms. Meili a “feeling of Osama Bin Laden.”
I wish I were joking. And this was on a recorded show, so there was no good excuse for that at all. A pox on stupid news captioners.
For more giggles, try watching one of those judge shows, like Judge Joe Judy, or People’s Divorce Dorks. The mispellings, delays, etc. are mind-boggling, especially considering that the shows are taped in advance.
Makes me wonder if our esteemed CinC found a second job.
I think my tv might be magical…
Next time I watch I’ll make a note of any alternate gags and let you know. More often than not the caption joke is funnier than the spoken joke!
People TYPE the closed captioning? Sheesh that IS bad. I always thought it was some sort of computerized thing ala “Dragon” or something.
Has anyone used that program? It has to decipher your “accent” and “get to know you” before it can put the correct words to what you are really saying.
My boyfriend and I spent a hilarious couple of days getting his Dragon software working.
Because of all the weird typos, I always thought that the closed captioning was done on a similar program.
