I first stumbled over Spellcheck's wayward sense of humor years ago when I was writing about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Spellcheck rejected Capulet, which is Juliet's family name, and presumptuously instead offered the choice of either "co-pilot" or "copulate."
Spellcheck is deeply offended by proper names, uncommon words, neologisms, words in a language other than English, etc., and sometimes makes its impatience known by suggesting dadaist or absurd substitutions.
For example, everyone (everyone except Spellcheck, that is) knows that Muggletonians are members of a religion founded in England in the 1650s by Lodowick Muggleton which held, among other doctrines, the idea that heaven was only slightly above the reach of our uplifted arms. Spellcheck has an irrational animus toward this harmless, near-extinct religion and proposed as substitutes for Muggletonian, the words "Argentinian," "Miltonic," "Macedonian," "Justinian" and (as a pure instance of spellcheckian whimsy) "melatonin."
Apparently untutored in geography, Spellcheck rejected the ancient north African and modern upper New York state city of Utica in favor of "Attica," which makes a kind of sense, but also "Utah," which is a bit off-the-wall, "Utopia," which is nowhere, and the imaginative but bizarre "erotica."
A recent entry on berries provoked an orgy of spellcheckian absurdity. For fenberry, "Canberra"; for crowberry, both "crowbar" and "crockery"; for lingonberry, "linguine," "lingerie" and "nunnery"; for whortleberry, "wheelbarrow"; for earthberry, "authoress"; for cloudberry, "glittery" and the truly wild, out-of-left-field "Goldberg." Speaking of left field: for rbi's, Spellcheck proposed both "ribs" and "rabbis"; for Ebbets (as in Ebbets Field), simply "beets"; for Newcombe, as in the great Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe, "encumber."
In another recent post I invented the word "mccranwichorama," defined as a display of inferior coinages of words in which detached segments (such as the wich in cranwich) acquire new meaning. I knew that when I batted mccranwichorama over the net, I would probe the outer limits of Spelllcheck's powers, but I must say that the program rose to the occasion when it parried with a transcendent absurdity: for mccranwichorama: "mercurochrome."
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