Confessional; a.k.a. "Did you mean serotonin ?"

Confessional; a.k.a. "Did you mean serotonin?"

Jan. 6th, 2007 at 9:06 PM

I tend to think myself immune to the need for spell-check, but I do occasionally run it anyway. Tonight I found that in my most recent novel-in-progress, I misspelled the following words:

serotonin
idiosyncrasies
exhilaration

My one consolation is that Microsoft Word didn't know how to spell them either--that is, it had no suggestions on correcting them; it just "knew" they were wrong. I had to Google them to find the right spellings.

Comments

( 11 comments — Leave a comment )

rachel2205

Jan. 7th, 2007 01:26 pm (UTC)

MS couldn't spell exhilaration? What is the world coming to?! Word's spellcheck is pretty dire, though.

My problem as well is that my thesis obviously contains a lot in not-modern-English, so spell-checking involves a lot of clicking the "ignore" button!

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mollyringle

Jan. 9th, 2007 01:23 am (UTC)

I know; I only got one letter wrong; you'd think they could guess at the right word!

Hah, I bet your list of added words to the spellcheck would confound most of us. :)

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thomas_a_kempis

Jan. 7th, 2007 02:41 pm (UTC)

Oh Yeah..

I saw an obvious instance in a web article by the Rasmussen Report the other day and laughed. Microsoft is good at making money and not much else...likely you will be better than spell check for years to come.

+

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mollyringle

Jan. 9th, 2007 01:24 am (UTC)

Re: Oh Yeah..

The difficulties of telling a computer how to understand and use any human language seemed to me, in my small amount of linguistic training, to be far beyond current capabilities. I feel deeply sorry for those who make it their work right now. :)

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terrylj

Jan. 7th, 2007 03:18 pm (UTC)

MS Word can't spell bureaucracy either. Well, either that, or I had mangled it so badly that it didn't recognize the word. ;)

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mollyringle

Jan. 9th, 2007 01:25 am (UTC)

Heheh. I was only one letter off with all three of those words, so I think it's just being dense.

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kali_kali

Jan. 7th, 2007 07:54 pm (UTC)

I'm constantly annoyed about MS Word's inability to recognize possessive-ization of words it is told to add to the dictionary or ignore. For instance, if I were talking about (as has happened in my papers on Central Asia), the president of Kazakhstan, Nazarbayev, MS Word wouldn't like his name. Once I tell them to ignore it, they will, but they won't ignore "Nazarbayev's" automatically, which I believe they should. Grrr.

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mollyringle

Jan. 9th, 2007 01:32 am (UTC)

Oh yes, I hate that too. How hard could it be to add the programming needed to recognize such a thing?

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(Deleted comment)

mollyringle

Jan. 9th, 2007 01:33 am (UTC)

It's only one occurrence. :) My main teenage girl character is into psychology, so she mentions it in passing.

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kalquessa

Jan. 12th, 2007 05:32 pm (UTC)

I can never spell "serotonin" without looking it up. Some part of my brain insists that one of those vowels is absolutely an A, despite all evidence to the contrary.

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