The Columnist Manifesto

Okay, so it started when I checked out a Google search on my referral pages ("what Maris family has to say about Mark McGuire" -- CM = 11th out of 3,420 results), but it quickly turned into something only slightly less trivial. First off, I never blogged about what the Maris family has to say about Mark McGwire; turns out that was in one of the comments on one of my posts. What this all made me wonder was whether my blog was relatively highly ranked in searches for "Mark McGuire" because that's a misspelling of his name. It's not spelled with a U, but with a W -- "McGwire" -- and I consistantly spelled it wrong in posting about steroid use. One of these days I may go back and correct this.

Interestingly (though not "importantly"), a Google search for "Mark McGuire" with a U does not get the helpful Google spelling message, Did you mean: mark mcgwire. What' more, the "Mark McGuire" search yields about 2.2 MILLION results, compared to only 596,000 for Mark McGwire spelled correctly. Apparently, there are (a) lots of people who misspell baseball baseball star Mark McGwire's name on the internet, (b) some real people who actually are named Mark McGuire with a U -- such as the Associate Professor of Medicine at the Central Clinical School at The University of Sydney, Australia.

So is this about spelling? It's not like you can look up McGwire in a dictionary, and if you could, it would reveal that (I'm guessing) it's a variant of the more common "McGuire." Instead, you have to go to a reputable information source about Mark McGwire -- and not, for example, to my blog. So perhaps the misspelling of the name of a person in the news is not an example of bad spelling but of bad journalism.

Huh. Weird.

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