Here's a headline from the Money section of the Feb 3 Salt Lake Tribune. Bennett: Ruling won't give big business undo campaign sway.
Did you spot it? The word should be undue, or more than is appropriate. As it stands, the headline seems to say that business might have the power to dismantle campaigns. Well, maybe that's true too.
In this case, the culprit is spell check, which causes us to pay attention only to those words that have the little red squiggly line under them.
So, we need rules for using spell check. I know two:
1) Spell check doesn't cover all words; just the ones in the lexicon. So, unusual words or proper nouns are frequently underlined. The problem is that we often assume that a proper noun, say the name Noam Chomsky, though underlined, is spelled correctly. But all the spell check does is compare the spelling with words in its data banks. It will underline both Noam and Naom. The way to fix this is to put such words into the computer's lexicon and then any deviations will show up. If I put Noam in, then Noam will show up underlined in squiggly red.
2) Spell check won't find words that are correct but spellings different from the one you wanted to use. Undue/undo, and a host of others. Someone, a human preferably, needs to make sure that the computer hasn't missed anything.
Which in the case of today's Tribune, didn't happen.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
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