Horizon

Viruses and Grammar

For all those current or former English majors still wondering what good their traning did them, here's a consolation. The best way to avoid being taken in by some random email with an attachment full of malicious code or a link to a fake login page is not to be computer savvy, but to have good grammar.

I just received a fairly impressive email claiming to be from Red Hat, one of the largest Linux distributors, telling me that a new security problem had been identified and urging me to download a patch (from a provided link), and run it on my Linux machine.

Granted I'm not a Linux guru (in fact, my grammar's not so hot either), but the email was relatively convincing. The reply-to address looked real, the link looked real, the technical details seemed plausible to a casual user, and it even ended with convincing boilerplate. And, most impressive of all, it was almost free of grammatical errors.

I have never seen any kind of email hoax, whatever the con involved, that didn't have at least one obvious grammatical error. It's true that a lot of the ridiculous ones are clearly written by someone with nothing but a dictionary, but this rule applies to all of them without fail, even the ones which were obviously written by someone with a good command of the language.

It's as if someone goes to the considerable trouble and risk of setting up an exact duplicate of some bank's or software company's website, and then doesn't bother rereading the email they are about to spam half the world with to lure it there. Strange.

On the other hand, there are the legions of copy editors and proofreaders that companies employ, all for the sake of making sure that "proofreader" is not spelled as two words and that the rules for "affect/effect" are adhered to. The arguments for rigidly standardized grammar and spelling have always been a little thin and unconvincing, especially considering that most of the world got along fine without them for so long, as well as the arbitrary and sometimes contradictory nature of the rules themselves (which we inherited, after all, from Latin, a very different kind of language).

All the stuff about clarity and linguistic ambiguity are mostly hogwash. Companies employ copy editors to give their communications with the outside world the kind of cache that comes with perfect grammar. Grammar that is so perfect, that is, that a team of experts is needed to uniformly produce it.

Yes, although most people could not reproduce this heavily edited language without a lot of effort, if at all, they somehow can sense it when they are reading it, and, what's more, think that the ability to write this way is a sign of intelligence. Thus hyper-correct grammar becomes an emblem of institutionality which most people with a reasonable grasp of English grammar can recognize intuitively. And this, something which normally serves little more purpose than to help keep exclusive groups exclusive, turns out to be such a useful defense against virus propagators and online con artists.

Posted by Alan Hogue at November 19, 2004 05:01 PM