That sound you hear is eight bits

What sound does a byte make? A sound byte, of course! Those eight consecutive ones and zeroes in your computer form a byte. A brief statement is a sound bite:

An unsound bite

Why would anyone use a common, boring expression like “sound bite” when you can spice it up with a new and improved spelling? The writer of this blog on Yahoo! Shine follows the site’s tradition of inventing a new spelling for a perfectly fine word:

Everyday errors may presage change every day

Every day there are so many grammatical, spelling, punctuation, and other errors floating around the Web that I wonder if I’m completely behind the times. The language is always evolving, and maybe that’s what accounts for these errors from Yahoo! Shine:

Am I so tragically out of touch with the digital age that I missed the introduction of “sound byte” into our everyday lexicon to mean “a brief statement”?

I readily admit to complete ignorance when it comes to the meaning of “heavily-based,” though I suspect the hyphen joining this alleged compound is wrong, just as it’s wrong to use a hyphen following an adverb ending in LY.

What sound does a byte make?

I thought they were rather quiet, actually. But the writer of this Yahoo! Shine teaser may have been listening more intently than I to the eight bits that form a byte:

If you lean in real close to your computer, maybe you can hear a sound byte, too.