It’s official. I hate my computer, not only because its plans for world domination interfere with my homework assignments, but because its Spell Check is so monumentally dumb.
I realise, of course, that it isn’t my computer that’s to blame, but rather my version of Microsoft Office. Admittedly, it is only the 2007 version, and I understand that one year in computing terms is a very, very long time, but is it too much to ask that my computer understands the basics of the English language?
And the worse thing is that, in this line of work, I’m forced to use Microsoft Word a lot, because my only other option is Notepad, and typing in that is like dousing one’s soul in kerosene.
In theory, a computer program that reads through what you’ve written, handily underlines any mistakes, and then corrects them for you, is a typist’s dream. No more reprinting a document fifteen times because the fourteen previous drafts had mind-numbingly obvious errors (which are never, ever visible when you read through it on the screen). Except that, like Communism, the Atkins Diet and Spandex, it falls through in practice.
It’s the green squiggles which get my goat. The computer feels that I, as an A English student, and as a person who has spoken English my entire natural life (and Afrikaans for a minority of my unnatural one), don’t quite understand the nuances of grammar. Its favourite trick is to underline a rough tenth of my writing with green, and when I check it, gives me the mysteriously ambiguous “Fragment (consider revising)”, which, in itself, is not a proper sentence. You’ll have noticed that I write a lot of fragmented lines, which are more phrases than sentences, but we both know it makes for a more relaxed reading style. It also has a tendency to not understand the possessive “its” when I refer to inanimate objects (like above “its Spell Check is so monumentally dumb”).
I like to think that, because of my expanded vocabulary, I don’t suffer the sight of too many red lines, because I actually know how to spell words longer than “cat”, but my computer disagrees with me once again. It hates extended words, for example. So it recognises “elf” and “elves”, but not, strangely, “elven”. So, logically, one can have as many elves as one wants in my computer’s world, but they won’t resemble anything particularly mysterious. While I admit I make up a few words from time to time, they have obvious linguistic ancestries that I don’t need my machine to disagree with. Therefore, it hates my inspired usage of the word “pontification”, meaning “the stuff that results when a person pontificates”, and “isolationalism”, which denotes “the formal position taken by groups that wish to isolate themselves from others.
And, for God’s sake, don’t ever use names and Proper Nouns in your writing. My computer gets on well with people on a first name basis (so long as, of course, they can realistically be expected to come from Alabama. Which means it will accept “Irene” and “Jeremiah”, but don’t try “Thandi” or “Yei-Ning”), but surnames are written off the moment you begin, unless you’re descended from the English (and thus are called “Miller”, “Carter” or even “Thomson”). Realistically, you can add these names to the dictionary, but you’ll have to add each of the derivatives in turn. Thus, you must input “Thandi”, “Thandi’s” and even, if you know a lot of them, “Thandis”.
Alternatively, you can become a hermit, have absolutely no social life or family members, and never suffer from a red squiggle again.
And then, just when I thought I had it all figured out, my computer came put with…wait for it…BLUE SQUIGGLES! What the hell does a blue squiggle signify? Only after very careful reading did I catch on to the fact that a blue squiggle denotes the incorrect substitution of one homophone for another (“there” for “their”, “know” for “no”), a mistake which I tend to make embarrassingly often.
So I must conclude that Spell Check is an evolutionary dead-end. If it disagrees with people who can actually speak the language, makes up its own words (like “vu”) and persists in covering my screen in the digital equivalent of moss, I can only surmise that, sooner or later, there will be a revolution in which computer users join forces with the Oxford English Dictionary and lay siege to the Microsoft offices.
Dibs on the matches,
Bontage.
PS: The lovely little setting which fools you into thinking that you can get Spell Check to spell like an Englishman instead of a Yank is a lie. There is no spoon.
PPS: AND FOR THE LAST TIME YOU BUG-INFESTED MACHINE WHY ON EARTH DO YOU THINK I’D WANT TO END EVERY MISSIVE WITH A TAWDRY WORD LIKE “BONDAGE”?! IT’S A NICKNAME!