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The Grumpy Grammarian

I often remind students that spell-check can't read for sense or – to put it in a way that spell-check would accept – Eye oft ten remand stew dents that spill-chick cant reed fur scents.  Anything that's in its dictionary will pass muster, as long as it's spelled correctly.  So, if I had used the wrong its or it's, or had written "piss mustard" instead of "pass muster" in the previous sentence, spell-check would have passed it with flying colors – or frying collars.

We usually think of spell-check's limitations in terms of commonly confused words, such as there/their, to/too, its/it's, then/than, and the like, but that is only the start.  It will also miss the kinds of mistakes that even the best spellers and most accurate typists among us often make.  Fast typists frequently omit, add, transpose, or substitute letters, and these errors will fly by spell-check unnoticed.  Let's take a look.

If we omit a letter, we can change a friend into a fiend, a phrase into a phase, a comma into a coma, a month into a moth, clothes into cloths, a window into a widow, a house into a hose, our brothers into our bothers, and revolution into evolution.  We can make the verb possess become posses and, worse yet, change the verb assess to asses.  We can inadvertently write about watering our pants instead of our plants, being in bed with a cod instead of a cold, or wearing shoes made of lather instead of leather.  We may refer to a fright train instead of a freight train, the government may have a hug deficit instead of a huge deficit, and we may refer to something as being needles instead of needless.  One of the most common errors is to turn a manager into a manger, and one of the most embarrassing is to type pubic for public.

Of course, the reverse is true if we accidentally add a letter to the intended word.  Instead of liking something, we may be licking something; instead of hoping, we may be hopping, a pop may change to a poop, and a lad may be transformed into a lady.   We may use a garden horse, brew coffee in a coffee plot, participate in a stewing circle, sunbathe at the bleach or breach, have a cleaver idea, take a long nape, deposit money in a blank account, eat some braked (or beaked) beans or maybe pleas and smashed potatoes, clean up a mess with paper trowels, or go to the zoo to see the polar beards.

Transposed letters usually create nonwords, which spell-check will recognize as typos, but sometimes they will create legitimate words.  A dairy may become a diary, or quiet may become quite.  A minute may turn into a minuet, and a bra could become a bar.  Shakespeare may be referred to as "The Brad of Avon."

Substituting one letter for another introduces a host of possibilities.  A miss can become a mess, mass, muss, or mist – and spell-check wouldn't notice.  A snake could become a stake; a male could be a mule, mall, mile, or malt; a bride could turn into a bribe or a basket into a casket.  We might do something weakly instead of weekly; we might convert vowels to towels or bowels; we could send a litter instead of a letter and hit a goof ball instead of a golf ball (which might make the goof bawl).  The stock market might become the shock market or the stuck market, either of which may be accurate but not what we intend.  Something that is better may become bitter (or butter or batter); a mature person could turn into a manure person; a sagacious thought may become a salacious thought; and the audience at a concert might be crapping their hinds instead of clapping their hands.

Ass any one who reeds this can sea, spill-chick is not gong to ketch awl mist takes.  Its no subs tee toot fir poof reeling.

Many words can be converted to another acceptable word by adding, dropping, or changing a letter (addling, drooping, or clanging a litter).  Other pitfalls await the unwary.  If we do use a nonexistent word, spell-check will suggest a list of options, and it is tempting to automatically select the first choice.  For example, if we type desent, we're okay if we meant descent (which is spell-check's first choice) but not if we meant decent (the second choice); we might end up writing, "He's a descent person."  Until recently, if we typed definately (a common misspelling of definitely), the first option in spell-check was defiantly, so I had students writing such things as, "I defiantly agree . . . ."  That has been changed (definitely now has the top spot) – but there's still no guarantee that the checker's first option is the word we intend.

In a composition that I read recently, a student wrote about a "tang top," referred to "a consent reminder" (instead of a constant reminder), said that young people do some things "do to per pressure," and named "sexually transmitted dieses" as one of the "lending causes of death" – all in one essay that I'm sure she spell-checked.  I was a bit puzzled by how dieses got through until I looked it up and found out that a diesis is a kind of dagger, its plural is dieses, and the word must be in spell-check's dictionary.  It's somewhat surprising that an unusual word such as dieses is in spell-check's dictionary because another hazard of depending on spell-check is that it does exclude some legitimate words.  Spill-chick is snot prefect.

[Part 2 comments on confusion of similar words – another type of error that spell-check won't spot because it can't read for sense.]