Comments

Then there's always the other types of spell-check related problems, like this classic:

Spell-checking on his computer is never going to be the same for Santa Cruz solo practitioner Arthur Dudley.

In an opening brief to San Francisco's 1st District Court of Appeal, a search-and-replace command by Dudley inexplicably inserted the words "sea sponge" instead of the legal term "sua sponte," which is Latin for "on its own motion."

"Spell check did not have sua sponte in it," said Dudley, who, not noticing the error, shipped the brief to court.

That left the justices reading -- and probably laughing at -- such classic statements as: "An appropriate instruction limiting the judge's criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction."

And: "It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense."

The sneaky "sea sponge" popped up at least five times.

-- KDeRosa - 05 Mar 2006

An early version of Microsoft Word (say, early to mid 90's) didn't have "fileserver" in its spellcheck dictionary. When I asked for a suggestion, I got "philaderer". (I was just experimenting, verifying that I didn't trust Word to improve my document any further than I could throw Microsoft)

-- AndyLange - 06 Mar 2006

I turn off spell checking immediately after turning off all of the other automatic "correction" tools, which is the first thing I do after a new install of Word.

-- GoogleMaster - 06 Mar 2006

The 107 Most Frequently Used Words in Written English
(Zeno et al., 1995)

sea sponge!

I love it!

Awhile back I was using one of those word recognition programs; I forget why.

The recognition errors it made were so wild I had to put a disclaimer at the top of every document I sent to anyone, saying that I'd typed it using voice-recognition.

Spell check didn't catch any of the errors, of course, because everything was spelling correctly.

-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Mar 2006

Then there was the time a friend & I were having a HUGE battle with a parent group called 'FECA.'

My friend pointed out that every single time she ran spell check Word would try to change 'FECA' to 'fecal.'

ha-ha-ha

-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Mar 2006

Google Master

why don't you use spell check?

-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Mar 2006

1. I don't trust spell check. It changes things that don't need to be changed. Plus, this way, I have to read and reread what I've written so I can catch other errors that crept in during editing.
2. Most of the words that I type in an average day are domain-specific or company-specific technical terms or abbreviations that are never going to be in any dictionary, and it takes too long to add everything to the dictionary.
3. Too much chaff, very little wheat.

-- GoogleMaster - 07 Mar 2006

Most of the words that I type in an average day are domain-specific or company-specific technical terms or abbreviations that are never going to be in any dictionary

oh, yeah....that would be a mess

I can have a l-o-n-g spell check session sometimes just with proper names

-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Mar 2006

Most of the words that I type in an average day are domain-specific or company-specific technical terms or abbreviations that are never going to be in any dictionary, and it takes too long to add everything to the dictionary.

Most modern spell-checkers allow you to customize the database to include any words you want to include. What you do have to do is to watch out what words are in the "automatically correct" list.

-- KDeRosa - 07 Mar 2006

The main problem is that the set of words that would need to be added to the dictionary is far larger than the set of words that would be mistyped and not caught by visual inspection.

-- GoogleMaster - 07 Mar 2006