Your Always Write with Spell Check
I used to be a wonderful speller. I understood the rules and the exceptions to the rules. I knew about roots and etymology. I could spell proper names, foreign words and just about anything else. However, after more than a decade of using Spell Check, I have trouble spelling anything and everything. I mean that literally; I have trouble spelling the words “anything” and “everything.” Spell Check has affected my spelling skills in the same way speed dialing affected my ability to remember phone numbers and GPS systems affected my being able to find my way around. It’s nice to be able to cut down on the clutter in your brain by turning such tasks over to technology; however, you then become a prisoner of that technology, unable to remember things that would ordinarily pose no problem. Without a computer or a cell phone or a GPS device, I can’t spell, I can’t call anyone and I can’t find anything.
There are additional problems when you allow a machine to do your spelling work. For one thing, it doesn’t notice if you use a wrong word if that word actually exists. Did you type “me” instead of “my?” “There” instead of “their?” Spell Check doesn’t much care. You also have to be careful about the list of alternative words most Spell Check systems offer. When checking a document or an email, it’s easy to accidentally substitute an inappropriate word. I once emailed a friend in Honolulu and used the Hawaiian word for “thank you” (Mahalo). Spell Check didn’t recognize the word and offered “Maalox” as an alternative. That would have changed the message’s meaning in a number of strange ways.
Happily, Ricochet is set up in way that allows spelling to be checked (with the same shortcomings of other such systems). So if there are any spelling problems in this little essay, don’t go blaming my!
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Comments:
Jun '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
Pat: A little story on the problem of misspelling a word with another word.
The words "public" and "pubic" are quite similar, and Spell Check doesn't warn you that you may have substituted one for the other.
As an attorney, I do work before public utility commissions in various states. Let's just say that I referred to a public utility commission in an unnamed state by using the other very similar word. Not the highest point of my storied career.
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
I'm sure Public Defenders' offices have had similar issues.
May '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
And Republicans.
Jun '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
I think Spell Check is the greatest invention since the printing press. Of course, I'm of the age when we learned to type on manual machines and then scrubbed off our errors with an eraser that looked somewhat like a precambrian sea creature. Half the effort (and more than half the time) in producing a decent college term paper was entirely mechanical.
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
Pat, here is yet another wrinkle. Most of my emails and posts to Ricochet are done via Droid smart phone. It's much more convenient for me, as a long haul trucker, than trying to find WIFI hot spots for my lap top. The problem arises with the little virtual keyboard thingamabob that I use to compose. It not only suggest different words if it doesn't recognize the one I am typing out,..it inserts them! That little feature has caused me no small amount of anguish, and taught me to re-read my work several times. Of course, even then, I don't catch everything. Fortunately, Ricochet's editors have saved my bacon more than once. My favorite line, by the way: "Bad spellers of the world, untie!"
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
One book I keep waiting for: an adaptation of the inevitable online warehouse of auto-correct failures. Here's a good one. My favorite: MS Word suggests replacing "Aguilera" with "uglier."
May '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
I saw this in the early '80s taped to the side of a phototypesetting console. It probably goes back to Gutenberg, and a variant before that to the scribes of antiquity.
Ever Have A "Typo?
The typographic error
Is a slipery thing and sly
You can hun til you are dizzy
But is somehow will get by
Till the forms are off the presses
It is strange how still it keeps,
It shrinks down in a corner
And it never stirs orpeeps
The typographic error
Is to small for human eyes
Till the ink is on the paper ..
When it grows to mountain size
The boss she stares with horror
Then grabs her hair and groans
The copy reader drops his head
Upon his hands and moans
The remainder of the issue
May be clean as clean can bee,
But that typographic error
Is the olny thing you sea
Jul '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
I'm "old school," I proofread and then just put Liquid Paper on my monitor.
Jun '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
And of course, the robot overlords continue to evolve. The ad next to your post is for Grammarly, Instant Grammar Checker. Next they will be writing for you...
and a happy time that will be. All we will have to do it relax by the pool.
--Comment finished by Robitor, your friendly editor.
Jun '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
When you add Google to spell check you get Stupid R Us. In another generation a television show such as “Jeopardy” will have no contestants, because no one will remember anything. What future generations will do is Google everything. Twenty years from now if you ask someone, “Who was Alexander Graham Bell?” You’re likely to get by way of answer, “Give me a second and I’ll Google him on my iPhone.” Move along folks, there’s no irony to see here.
May '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
Exactly. I was just thinking just this morning that both my parents and grandparents had encyclopedia sets, dictionaries and a thesaurus or two.
We, however, do not own a dictionary, let alone an encyclopedia series (can they even be bought anymore?). It has been 10 years since we've even had a phone book. Well, we did get something resembling a phone book on the doorstep last week, but I think it's already hit the recycling.
May '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
I haven't used any spell-check program in years. I Google the word and a link to Merriam-Webster's definition is usually on the first page.
I also use that method to ensure a word means what I think it means. It seems I do that more and more -- perhaps a sign of just the sort of brain rot you describe, Pat. Maybe it's better to just wing it.
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
Maybe Wordcooper has the reason why I can't seem to post anything critical of the Democrats from my roost in Silicon Valley. Here, let me try again: "I love the Obama administration." Did that come through?
May '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
I suppose it's not too dissimilar to younger generations and their reliance on calculators to the detriment of basic arithmetic skills.
As a TESOL teacher for many years I will speak in defence of spell-checkers at least in so much as they reduce the number of spelling mistakes in essays by non-native speakers. It doesn't deal with all the problems as noted by others but for a weary teacher, it reduces the number of red marks one has to insert into the text.
May '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
My worst experience with spell check was when I was running late for a Board meeting. I took a call in the parking lot and sent one of my fellow Board members a text to let him know I would be there soon. My text went through as "I'll join you in sex". It was supposed to be "sec".
May '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
Another For Nick
Spell Checker................
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pee sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye ken knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shoos me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
-Sores unknown
May '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
This thread reminds me of a favorite post from our compadres at Power Line. On January 6, 2008, Paul Mirengoff quipped, "We'll know that Huckabee has truly arrived when the spell-check on my computer stops changing his name to 'Chickadee.'"
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
Mine suggests changing "Sajak" to "Seajack."
May '10
Re: Your Always Write with Spell Check
Sajak
Mine does too! And then it asks for a ransom to change it back....