1fidosplace

Words

Word-processing software: where do the people who designed this stuff get off? I’ve been using various forms of this for many, many years and I still find myself regularly breaking down and cursing at the screen as it tries to tell me—yes ME the writer—that I don’t know what the flip I am talking about. Most days it seems as though the program doesn’t want me to write anything at all; in fact, if you look closer, it seems as if it wants me to give up on language entirely and revert to making howls and grunts. No matter what I do, it will say I am doing it wrong. By sticking so rigidly to the rules of grammar and punctuation, this kind of software eliminates the playful and often fun-loving aspects of our great English language. Quite simply I wish someone would stand up and say “It was me! I did it! I made word-processing applications the shambles they are! So there!” But this will never happen, of course, because the person responsible is laughing at us. My theory is this: the whole thing started out as a joke, and it became so funny over time that the people in charge just thought they would let it run.

The main problem this kind of software seems to have with us humans and our human ways is that we don’t always spell sentences correctly. There seems to be no accounting for the fact that large parts of England, Scotland and Wales couldn’t give a monkeys what a sentence should look like. That said–if spell-checking software was to take that in to account then I think we might have a rather massive problem on our hands. Overnight documents would become unreadable (as some Scottish people seem to be to 99% of English) and the world as we know it would probably collapse into a fine and pathetic mess.

An update for everyone: I have news about the trailride, it appears that there is something about horse insurance that we need to look into. I know nothing about this, so Annette if you could do this it would be a load off my mind.

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