Independent Thinking

This picture pretty much says everything all by itself, but let’s be clear and explain it any way.

My father was writing an e-mail this morning and this window popped up in his automatic “Spelling and Grammar Checker.” The program objected to the phrase,”This site will explain” because it felt the subject and verb didn’t match.

It went on to suggest:

• This site will explains
• This site wills explain
• The site wills explain
• These site wills explain
• Those site wills explain

Hmm. With that list of choices, where do I begin?

Well, other than that he was correct in the first place? Then, well, last time I checked, “wills” is not a verb. Or rather, it’s not this verb. It can mean “to will,” as in, how you leave someone an inheritance, in which case I suppose that Dad’s statement would have been grammatically incorrect … but since his e-mail wasn’t leaving anything to any one it’s not exactly relevant. Not to mention that, as verbs go, the “I like you so much, I’m leaving you something when I die” version of “will” is a whole lot less common than the “exercise your will, make a choice, make something happen” kind of “will.” That’s like a spell-checker thinking I meant “bee” like the honey-bee when writing “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

The point of the story? Electronic aids like spell-checkers may be useful things, but you should never, ever depend on them. Not only do they get confused about homonyms like aunt/ant, be/bee and uncertain about words that are misspelled into other, valid words (like, “could” instead of “cold”) . . . sometimes, like the system in the picture, they’re just plain stupid, no matter how well-meaning.

There’s simply no substitute for the human brain.