Reply #197: Calm down, everyone. Jeesh. The captioner made a mistake

[BlueinBushCountry]

Okay, I actually know something about how captioning is done and I read and write steno. Here is why this is an easy mistake and not some terrible conspiracy:

Here's a picture of the layout of the keyboard they use.



The way it works is they can actually strike all letters at once, rather than one at a time like a QWERTY keyboard, so they can write a whole word in one handstroke instead of a single letter. The letters on the left are the first letters of a syllable, the vowels in the middle, and the letters on the right are the last letters in a syllable. So if they want to write the word "Cat" (which is done phonetically) they would strike the K on the left, A with the thumb in the middle, and T with the right hand, which would come out looking like this on the print:

K A T
And then a computer translates that to "cat" using a dictionary of words that have previously been entered and translated.

Now.
You'll notice not all of the letters are on there. For instance, there's no L on the left side. So they use combinations of other letters to form the letters that aren't on there. In the case of L, they strike the H and R on the left side together. So "let" would look like this:

HR E T

They use a lot of shortcuts (they call em "briefs") since they can only do a syllable at a time, and when someone's talking fast you have to keep up. So they can use one short stroke like UFL for unfortunately. That way there're only one stroke instead of four for every syllable in the word.

So. If her brief form for Hillary Clinton was H-K (there's no K on the right, so BG is used for K) it would look like this:

H BG

And if Al Qaeda was L-K (very plausible, IMO) it would look like this:

HR BG


So you can see how that's an honest and easy mistake if her fingers were tired. :) I don't know much about much, but I do know steno, so I just had to register and comment.