More spellchecker fun
Two pieces of e-mail yesterday on the oddities of spellcheckers.
Can you guess what happened when
Piotr Orbis Proszynski put benefactive through his Outlook
spellchecker; and
Bruce Webster wrote e-mail about a cat named Tigger via Thunderbird mail; and
the word in question wasn't in the spellchecker's dictionary?
Apparently, there's not much close to
benefactive;
the only thing Proszynski's spellchecker could suggest was
generative. My Word for Mac
spellchecker does the same. At least, Proszynski remarked, the
spellchecker offered a linguistics term.
I tried a few more grammatical terms, more or less at random, on my
Mac, and found that
ergative
and
illative were in its
dictionary, but (no surprise)
semelfactive
was not --
simulative was the
only alternative offered -- nor was
antipassive,
for which the entertaining
ant
passive was offered. Other terms elicited a richer set of
substitutes:
allative:
illative, ablative, elative, ablatives, allusive
inessive: inside, intensive,
emissive, indecisive, inactive, insider, insides, immersive
But on to Webster and
Tigger.
This time the surprise was what was
IN the
spellchecker's dictionary.
Tigger:
nigger, rigger, digger, bigger, trigger, tiger
My own spellchecker won't go there (but it preserves caps):
Tigger:
Tiger, Trigger, Tigers, Digger
Webster wonders, "do any spell checkers have lists of words that are in
the dictionary but that they
won't
suggest?" I see that my own spellchecker
DOES
have
nigger in its
dictionary. Maybe it blocks the word as a suggested replacement,
or maybe its search algorithm just treats it as too far from
Tigger.
[Added 2/18/08: five people (so far) have written to verify that many spellcheckers, including various releases of the spellchecker for Microsoft Word, do indeed block taboo and slur vocabulary as replacements. The alternative would be to remove these words from the spellchecker's dictionary. But then, as Jeff Erickson points out to me, the program would underline these words in red when they appeared in text, thus drawing attention to them.]
[Added 2/18/08: Bexquisite reports that a Firefox spellchecker suggested as replacements for
fuchsia: Auschwitz, obfuscate. Not at all helpful.]
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 17, 2008 02:04 PM