Spellchecker Carnage!

[cimorene]

Automatic spellcheckers, those functions that do more harm than good most of the time, are nonetheless a necessary evil for people whose grasp of spelling is shaky for some reason or other. But nothing more eloquently illustrates the need to use them with alertness than their effect on proper names (you'd think it would be possible for some sort of algorithm to guess when a capitalised word is probably a proper name, but then, you'd think whoever was using the computer in the first place would TURN IT OFF when they knew they were typing A LIST OF NAMES).

At languagelog: High school students' names spellchecked into surreality in their yearbook. As reported in the New Scientist last year, the April 2007 issue of Contemporary Sociology contained a review article with contributors' last names changed from Gareis to Agrees, Beavais to Beavers, Gerstel to Gretel, and Sarkisian to Sardinian. Ahahahhahaha.

Comments

[indolentncrazy.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this marvelous link! A giggle indeed. Wordstar used to suggest "devoid" for david, but the novelty eventually wore off and I stopped giggling about it. Who can use autocorrect on a spell-checker anyway-- those thing recognize so few of the words one uses, and almost never suggest the right word for my typos. My most common is form when I mean from-- my old spell checker was customized to automatically check for that, but now I have to remember to check.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Since "David" is an old and very classical, not to mention popular name, you'd think that it would be in the spellchecker dictionary!