True Stories of Spell Checkers

I just read this article about the Paul McCartney and Heather Mills divorce in today’s New York Daily Post. I quote:

Heather Mills won a massive $48.6 million divorce settlement Monday from ex-Beatle Paul McCartney yesterday but quickly slammed it as chincy and vowed an appeal.

Dear New York Daily Post,

There is no such word at chincy.  The correct word is chintzy!

Thanks for letting me get this off of my chest.

Lots of technical writing and training uses the Concept A vs. Concept B notion. I personally don’t care for it myself; I don’t see it as a fight, but as really a discussion of how these concepts differ.

In any case, though, I most commonly see the abbreviation “vs.” in writing.

Yesterday, I was working on learning the training content for a class, which already has slides and content developed. About halfway through, I saw a really great typo in the slide title, Concept A verses Concept B.

 Would only that Concept A was writing poetry in verse for Concept B.

 I have already updated the slides with “versus”.

I am a very fast and somewhat careless typer, so I make lots of typing errors. This means, of course, that I must proofread my work carefully to catch mistakes, especially mistakes that are spelled correctly and thus pass through the spell checker with flying colors.

Wikipedia has a nice article about typos. It also includes the famous poem where all the words are spelled correctly but are completely wrong.

Wikipedia very succintly defines spell checker as:

In computing terms, a spell checker or spelling checker is a design feature or a software program designed to verify the spelling of words in a document, query, or other context, helping a user to ensure correct spelling. A spell checker may be implemented as a stand-alone application capable of operating on a block of text. Spelling checkers are most often implemented as a feature of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary or search engine.

The rest of the article is interesting as well and provides a good overview of spell checkers.

A former manager of mine wrote an email to a group of product executives and signed her email “With Warm Retards”.

 Naturally, it sailed right through the spell checker.

spellchecker or spell checker?  Microsoft Word accepts both.  Google prefers spell checker. Hmmm.

A company has an employee named Sunil Gupta. Microsoft Word insists on calling him Senile Guppy.

Best regards to Mr. Guppy!