A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and it is far
more insidious than last week's Chernobyl menace.  Named Strunkenwhite
after the authors of a classic guide to good writing, it returns e-mail
messages that have grammatical or spelling errors.  It is deadly accurate
in its detection abilities, unlike the dubious spell checkers that come
with word processing programs.

        The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate
America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words
and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace.  The CEO of LoseItAll.com,
an Internet startup, said the virus has rendered him helpless. "Each time
I  tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error
message: 'Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must  be
set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.' I threw my
laptop across the room."

        A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance company,
10-10-10-10-10-10-123, said: "This morning, the same damned e-mail kept
coming back to me with a pesky notation claiming I needed to use a
pronoun's possessive case before a gerund. With the number of e-mails I
crank out each day, who has time for proper grammar?  Whoever created this
virus should have their programming fingers broken."

        A broker at Begg, Barow and Steel said he couldn't return to the
"bad, old" days when he had to send paper memos in proper English.  He
speculated that the hacker who created Strunkenwhite was a "disgruntled
English major who couldn't make it on a trading floor.  When you're buying
and selling on margin, I don't think it's anybody's business if I write
that 'i meetinged through the morning, then cinched the deal on the cel
phone while bareling down the xway.' "

        If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could
mean the end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant
timesaver. A study of  1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found
that e-mail increased employees' productivity by 1.8 hours a day because
they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also
found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing
so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)

        Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect
because it doesn't come as an e-mail attachment (which requires the
recipient to open it before it becomes active). Instead, it is disguised
within the text of an e-mail entitled "Congratulations on your pay raise."
The message asks the recipient to  "click here to find out about how your
raise  effects your pension." The use of "effects" rather than the
grammatically correct "affects" appears to be an inside joke from
Strunkenwhite's mischievous creator.

        The virus also has left government e-mail systems in disarray.
Officials at the Office of Management and Budget can no longer transmit
electronic versions of federal regulations because their highly technical
language  seems to run afoul of Strunkenwhite's dictum that "vigorous
writing is concise." The White House speechwriting office reported that it
had received the same message, along with a caution to avoid phrases such
as "the truth is ... " and "in fact ... ."

        Home computer users also are reporting snafus, although an
e-mailer who used the word "snafu" said she had come to regret it.

        The virus can have an even more devastating impact if it infects
an entire network. A cable news operation was forced to shut down its
computer system for several hours when it discovered that Strunkenwhite
had somehow infiltrated its TelePrompTer software, delaying newscasts and
leaving news anchors nearly tongue-tied as they wrestled with proper
sentence structure.

        There is concern among law enforcement officials that
Strunkenwhite is a harbinger of the increasingly sophisticated methods
hackers are using to exploit the vulnerability of business's reliance on
computers. "This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of
computer code we have ever encountered. We just can't imagine what kind of
devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on
communications," said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the
telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave
him tied up for hours.

        Meanwhile, bookstores and online booksellers reported a surge in
orders for Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style."