Comments on: Deep in the heart of Texas: Anna Nicole, Houston Chronicle to compete in spelling be

by: patgray77

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:45:16 +0000

Touche. I broke a window.

by: patgray77

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:27:27 +0000

(Warning: that link is neither safe for work or family friendly.)*

Glass Houses for the grammer police?

That’s “grammar.” — Seth

by: vanillathunder

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:52:55 +0000

Following kinshane, “right” could have been used in the sense of creating like a “shipwright”…oh yeah, that’s misspelled too.

by: kinshane

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 06:58:17 +0000

Mnookmeister, how do you know the sentence wasn’t upset and needed righting? You know, like an apple cart or something.

by: deversm

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 04:16:24 +0000

With this gem:

On Wednesday, the Houston Chronicle ran the following caption on a picture illustrating a story about Anna Nicole Smith:

“..the model could barely right a sentence.”

I think Seth has discovered THE perfect example of irony.

by: CBaker

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 20:37:02 +0000

It’s not the fact that journalists have become so sleazy and so lazy that they can’t press the “Abc” spell-check button that bothers me most. What bothers me most is that journalists don’t take the time to read over what they have written. Maybe they just don’t care? At least there are a few published writers out there that actually care about their jobs.

by: TPIRman

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:29:15 +0000

Great point. I’ve often wondered about cases like “disminished,” too.

My theory is that reporters and columnists become inured to Microsoft Word’s modern spell-check feature. Anybody who’s ever typed up a lengthy piece in Word — especially one with a lot of proper nouns — has seen that the page sprouts a multitude of red zigzag underlines for words that are not in the program’s dictionary. Sure, you could go through and right-click on each word, adding it to your “custom” dictionary.

But most of the time, I think writers fall into a habit of ignoring the red lines because they don’t fell like stopping their work to teach the computer that yes, “Mientkiewicz” is spelled correctly. Thus even though Word will dutifully flag a slip-up like “disminished,” the program cries wolf too many times for the feature to be effective on a human level.