Dont Crie for20Me Argnetina

It's too darn hot in the Texas hill country, so I'm wishing I was hiking the Appalachian Trail.  "What's that, dear?"  "Hiking the Appalachian Trail" is a euphemism for what."  Hmm, I guess Governor Sanford will do for the Appalachian Trail what Governor Spitzer did for the Mayflower Hotel and President Clinton did for cigars.  Marketers take note.

But there's an important e-discovery lesson in this sad, sordid saga, and its not the familiar one about never using e-mail for something you wouldn't want to repeat on the witness stand.  Clients are going to do it anyway.  How else to coo sweet nothings to one's Argentine querida?  No, the lesson is about what you must do to find the smoking gun in ESI when using keyword search.

Reading the year old exchanges between the feckless Gov. Mark Sanford and the fetching Maria Belén Chapur, I was reminded of the importance of always making provision for misspelling and mistyping of crucial keywords in text search. You cannot assume that even smart, careful folks (and here we can safely exclude Gov. Sanford) will type or spell words correctly or consistently.  Plus, exchanges with persons like Ms. Chapur, for whom English is a second language, may understandably be replete with spelling errors.

Looking at Governor Sanford's missives, there are classic examples of transposition, misspelling, hyphenation and grammatical error, any of which might serve to frustrate a poorly-designed keyword search.  The Governor used:

eamils for "emails" or "e-mails" or even the acceptably plural "e-mail;"
Unbeleivably for "unbelievably;"
indepth for "in-depth" or "in depth;" and
lightening for "lightning."

Moreover, even careful spellers and typists can see their words corrupted by the peculiarities of incompatible systems or encodings.  Note the occurrences of  also20made and walking20away in the Sanford love letters which are likely corruptions by the e-mail client (or by the publisher) of the URL-encoded representation of the hexadecimal value for the space character in the ISO Latin-1 character set. (Try saying that three times fast).

Gov. Sanford is a product of well-educated parents and Florida and South Carolina schools.  He holds an MBA from the University of Virginia.  The majority of e-mail users have neither the benefit of his education nor his experience in communications.  E-mail from engineers and technical personnel is notoriously rife with misspellings and oddball constructions.  Transposition is endemic among fast typists.  One might be forgiven for believing that spelling, grammar and punctuation are no longer taught in our schools.  Spell check only goes so far.

So, don't underestimate the importance of including common misspellings, typing errors and punctuation flubs in your search protocols.  Don't assume the authors of the documents you seek correctly applied the "i before e except after c" rule or that their flying fingers weren't prone to transposition errors.  Always anticipate hyphenation errors for compound words, and consider whether fuzzy searching is needed for crucial keywords. 

If you're running searches against indexed data, be sure you know how the text recognition and index engines handle such things so you can be confident that your keyword searches will find the inevitable boo-boos along with proper usages. 

"Honey, I'm done with my post.  Care to turn down the A/C and take a hike on the Appalachian Trail?"