Has 'shepard' become normalised in US English? I've read several stories recently, with editors/proofreaders credited, that mention German Shepard dogs.
How ubiquitous is it? "While shepards washed their socks at night" at Christmas time?
AJ
Has 'shepard' become normalised in US English? I've read several stories recently, with editors/proofreaders credited, that mention German Shepard dogs.
How ubiquitous is it? "While shepards washed their socks at night" at Christmas time?
AJ
Has 'shepard' become normalised in US English? I've read several stories recently, with editors/proofreaders credited, that mention German Shepard dogs.
How ubiquitous is it? "While shepards washed their socks at night" at Christmas time?
Another example of the atrocious standards in education
There should be a rant about the abysmal standard of pronunciation amongst news reporters both on Radio and TV. But only those who care would read it and they don't need the reminder.
I was informed by the wife of a radio station owner, my first day on the job, that "news" was NOT to be pronounced as "noos" but instead to rhyme with "few." (For the U.S. educated, the word is "fee-eww.)
I always remembered that; I still cringe when TV hosts chime in to announced, "We have breaking noos!"
Looking at Google Ngram viewer, "shepard" shows up in both the American English corpus and the British English corpus.
However, the frequency in both of "shepard" vs "shepherd" is insignificant. It barely shows up, frequency of "shepard" is three orders of magnitude below "Shepherd".
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=shepherds%2Cshepards&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3#
The truly interesting thing is that in both the American and British corpus, "shepard" shows up back to the early 1800s. And there's no significant increase in frequency in modern times.
SOL has 116 stories containing 'German Shepard' and 455 stories containing 'German Shepherd'.
AJ
SOL has 116 stories containing 'German Shepard' and 455 stories containing 'German Shepherd'.
And how many that use both?
And how many that use both?
It needs someone smarter than me to wring that out of SOL's search facilities but I found a few.
AJ
There appear to be 18 using the Extended Search feature from the dropdown in Advanced Search.
There appear to be 18 using the Extended Search feature from the dropdown in Advanced Search.
I hope DS finds the information useful.
Would you care to educate me how to conduct such a search? Imagine you're teaching an idiot (which is actually true). Thanks.
AJ
I hope DS finds the information useful.
I do.
My initial thought was that if most of the stories using "shepard" also used "shepherd" then "shepard" was more likely to be a typo than an alternate spelling.
On the other hand, if the authors using "shepard" are doing so consistently, it's less likely to be a typo and more likely to be an alternate spelling.
As a common noun referring to people (or dogs) who herd sheep, "shepard" is a misspelling, and my browser squiggles it accordingly. However, "Shepard" is a not-uncommon surname, so computer spellcheckers don't usually flag it when it's capitalized, even when it should be "Shepherd".
I mean, you never know... maybe Alan Shepard has a dog named "German".
With our editors all volunteers without formal qualification and without pay, you may expect things like that to slip through during proofreading. Then again, nothing surprises me as long as students are called into the principle's office on sheer principal 😄. BTW, I wrote a sentence with "shepard" and my standard text processor, Pages, gives it the red dot mark of shame.