I use a spelling checker (specifically LanguageTool) in Firefox because I type like a caveman and make a lot of typos. But sometimes, whether it’s LanguageTool or the spelling checker in some other program, the checking just…stops. I type a word I know is spelled wrong, but it doesn’t get flagged or highlighted in any way.
I then wonder how many typos I’ve been churning out and will now have to find on my own, unaided by technology (the horror). And then for a little while, I no longer trust the software to work correctly, always questioning what exactly it might or might not be doing.
And I think, you’d have to be a real jerk to deliberately build these unpredictable malfunctions into your software. But I could totally see some people doing it for the laffs.
Remember, Bad Software comes from Bad People. This has been your Trust No One PSA for today.
(Also, the spelling checker1Or spell checker, if you prefer. Both are valid, because English makes its own rules. Then breaks them, Then repeats. worked fine for this post.)
A long time ago I had a dream to become a published author and I read somewhere that the biggest English-speaking book market is the good ol’ U.S. of A (this was before TikTok ruined everyone’s attention span and reading became quaint and/or gauche), so when it came to writing, the advice was to make your work as publication-ready as possible for the U.S. market, in anticipation of possible publication.
This led me to shunning my Canadian spelling heritage and switching the dictionary/language in various applications like Microsoft Word to U.S. English. I felt dirty, but also efficient and professional.
I had one story published in a (Canadian) Moose Lodge newsletter when I was 12. This was an actual newsletter, printed on actual paper. It was pretty thrilling when I was 12. This was the sum of all my publication efforts, and it was because the man who ran the newsletter was nice and wanted to encourage me.
But thanks to inertia and a weird need to be efficient, I have kept using the American spelling of words, even though I had long given up the idea of seeing my work formally published. Heck, I skipped National Novel Writing Month in 2020 and didn’t even feel guilty about it!
I am starting to lean back to switching to Canadian spelling. Sure, “labour” has one more letter than “labor” and with my typing speed, it makes a difference, but “labour” has character and flavor flavour. “Labor” has the blood ruthlessly drained from it.
Perhaps I am overthinking this.
I’ll ponder some more on this Labour Day, then make a decision, because I think that may have been one of my New Year resolutions–to be more decisive. Maybe?
Because someone has already written it, minus the plural. The only thing I missed was the local town corruption–but maybe I was too young and naive to imagine hearty mountain folk being bad.
I finally went back and scanned the story using OCR software, cleaned up the stuff that didn’t translate (there was a fair bit. The OCR program either doesn’t like the font used by my old portable Smith Corona typewriter, my writing style as an 11-year-old or probably both), but left in all of the typos to preserve the “you are there” feeling of reading a story written by a kid who wasn’t going to let spelling stop him from unleashing his creativity.
It is one of the worst things I have ever read. It is the worst thing I’ve read that was penned by my own hand. At times when I was re-reading the story, I became convinced it was a parody. I fancied myself quite the funny guy even back in elementary school, so it’s a plausible theory, but in the end, I think it’s just terrible writing lapsing into self-parody.
There is a temptation to do an annotated version that would offer commentary, sort of like you get with movies on DVD/Blu-ray/holographic projection where the director tells you what he was thinking for each scene, but in this case, it would be more, “What was I thinking?” period.
An example of that would be the introduction of the character Jim Fuller, described thusly:
He came up to Jim Fuller, a tall negro officer.
This was written in 1976, remember, not 1876. My defense here is that a) my mom described blacks/African Americans as negroes and b) eventually I got to the point where I gently corrected her on it. She was simply reflecting her own upbringing and I was doing the same, neither of us realizing the word might have evolved into a derogatory term, though I came to discover this on my own.
For now, you may “enjoy” this unfinished tale by clicking on the zipped file below (inside is a standard ePub document but WordPress won’t allow direct uploading of ePub files. I feel bad because the extra step of having to unzip this just to inflict it on yourself seems a bit cruel). Don’t read it late at night because you could end up having nightmares (over how horrible it is).
As a fun (?) experiment I ran CLAWS through the Hemingway editor and it’s not as bad as I thought, which nicely demonstrates how the Hemingway editor won’t actually stop you from committing terrible acts of writing if you are sufficiently motivated/unskilled. It reminds me of the Homer. Sure, it’s a car and it does car-like things, but would you really want to own one (unless you were Homer)?
Here’s the Hemingway editor summary:
I was in grade 5 when I wrote this so was clearly aiming the story at my peers.
Dodged a bullet on the adverbs and passive voice tasked me even then. Some things never change. If there was an assessment to determine “sentences are painful to read” I imagine the website would have crashed.
While rooting through my old school junk (so old it pre-dates the internet, compact discs and tipping more than 15%) I found a story called CLAWS that I wrote using my Smith Corona portable typewriter. I typed it out on small-sized paper to make it look like a paperback. Maybe I had a dream of binding or stapling it all together when done to further enhance the illusion. I dreamed big back then.
CLAWS was inspired by Jaws and more importantly, by the 1976 Jaws ripoff, Grizzly. Basically it was a monster movie as written by an 11 year old. I considered myself pretty good at spelling but apparently I was not so good at hitting keys on a typewriter. This would be reinforced twenty years later when Mavis Beacon caused me to curl up on the floor in a fetal position, vowing to never touch anther typing program ever again.
What I’m saying is there are a lot of typos, even just on the first page included below. This is what happens when your spelling checker is an actual dictionary and your delete key is waiting for you 15 years in the future. I give myself props for getting “its” right, though.
Reading it over, I’m struck by the staccato, Hemingway-like prose, sentences delivered like quick machine gun bursts.
The year was 1956.
It was an April morning.
It was a savage animal.
But would this stop the beast? No.
Too bad so many of the sentences appear to be in random order. Or maybe I was making a statement on the unpredictable nature of nature.
It’s like watching someone throw clay then realize that “throw clay” is an expression, you don’t literally throw it, so they go pick up the clay bits from the other side of the room, come back to the pottery table and then fashion together something that has all the required elements of whatever it is they’re making (probably an ashtray), but with everything about it just slightly wrong because let’s face it, they already threw the clay across the room, they’re probably not destined to make great art here.
CLAWS: Terrifying. And that’s just the typos.
But man, did I ever know how to end a first page. How it fought to live in man’s civilization? You have to read on to find out what happens. I picture CLAWS trying to fit in at boarding school. “He keeps mauling the other students,” Miss Pennington said. “It’s just not proper.”
I have been known to mock the occasional misspelling. I can’t explain why I do this. I recall vaguely from years ago that I read somewhere that spelling is not related to intelligence and can vouch for knowing people who are smart but fairly terrible at spelling. Much as I can’t explain why I might mock a misspelling, I likewise offer no insight as to why I generally do not have to look up a word in order to spell it correctly.
I am, however, ready to blame the Internet for making the general level of literacy (and spelling) that much worse. It’s a convenient scapegoat and it comes with lots of circumstantial evidence, like The Best Obnoxious Responses to Misspellings on Facebook. It’s quite possible every entry on the site is faked but they ring true.
This is almost like a comedy routine (warning: salty language):
Me, I don’t fuss over the occasional typo. I might raise an eyebrow when I see ‘rediculous’, I may open my mouth as if to say something after spotting a your/you’re slip. I pretty much pass right over its/it’s since that one just underscores how arbitrary and strange English is, anyway. But I do offer one warning:
