Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Out of the mouths of babes...

... and Spellcheck!

Just lately, I have been getting mightily fed up of all the perverse, illogical, insane suggestions that Microsoft Word's inbuilt "dictionary" throws at me whenever it doesn't recognise something I've typed.

But when I was doing some editing this weekend, it was bamboozled by the word Chineseness.

And it asked me:
Did you mean cheesiness?


There is inadvertent insight here. In many situations, the terms would be pretty much interchangeable.


1 comment:

John said...

Chineseness sounds too much like an Americanism but then Chineseisity, Chineseish don't sound much better. ;)
Ironically the best spell-checka I know is Google's. It beats Microsoft Word and any other word processor I've ever used & all the browsers' inline spelling features hands down. For the record it also has no problem with Chineseness. So yes, when they all fail me I just do a Google search of my horribly malformed words and get what I'm actually looking for every time.