My sister-in-law worked for a similar organisation. The thing that amused her was the totally inappropriate photos people often supplied for the remembrance packs. One one occasion she had to photoshop bubbles over a person photographed in their bath
Medical forums/communities are full of typos too. "I have lose bowls." It shows how despite a high literacy rate in America and near 90% high school graduation rate, that basic writing proficiency, which many of us may take for granted, is still difficult for many. Unlike communities which may self-select for education or IQ, everyone gets sick, so you see the full tapestry or range of humanity. It can also explain why the college wage premium is so wide and persistent, as the skills gap between college grads and non-grads is still so stark (secondary-school grade inflation obviously does not help either).
passion in place of passing, and symphony instead of sympathy is almost certainly inattention in the face of autocorrect, or carelessly tapping on the wrong completion.
during my last year of latin in school we translated lot's of one-line obituaries, originally carved in headstones. Many satirical. Their orthography and grammar was as liberal as the content, which came very handy matching our skill level. The carvers hardly knew more latin than we :-)
Life ends, typos last.
I presume "Terrible trade gyms" is a weird autocorrect for "tragedies"?
I can looking for a reference to curb your enthusiasm's dearest aunt episode. So posting this for some other fellow traveller.
Reminds me of the old and tasteless meme of being 'an hero'.
By any chance does anyone here know where I could find the text data from obituaries? I thought might have some luck asking the HN crowd! It's for a research paper I'm working on.
Typos don't seem so bad. A few years ago when a small article hit a California newspaper's website about my elderly uncle being murdered, the comments immediately filled with complete strangers agreeing that we, the family, had probably killed him because we didn't want to deal with taking care of him. That was great fun to read while trying to cope with his death.
I found it interesting that he wasn't allowed to read the obits themselves, so wouldn't even know if the subject was a human or dog. One might argue some distancing helps for these kinds of moderation jobs, but also sounds dehumanizing to not have any context at all.
Also of note is that he spent a lot of time keeping the comments "safe and sugarcoated", even deleting comments referencing "family fallouts and estrangement". There's such a strange culture around sanitizing people's images after their death and pretending they were angels. Some people were legitimate pieces of shit in life, and silencing those harmed by them in the interest of being politically correct sounds unfair to me. Caring only about letting their supporters grieve without having to think about the deceased's complexities, while for example, preventing those who were abused by them from voicing their thoughts seems to want to preserve order by sweeping anything unseemly under the rug.
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I worked as a dev at a startup building a competing online memorial product. We were small enough that moderation was split among the team, so I did a fair bit. I'd agree with the author here that violent or horrible content was rare, but when it did come through it always stuck in your mind. I'd always be surprised how someone could harbour such incredible hate against a dead person that they'd want to bestow it further onto their grieving loved ones. Overall, there was always at least an equal amount of incredibly deep and touching comments though. If I'm honest the things that were always the most sad to me were the memorials with no comments at all and an obituary that said not much more than that there would be no service.