Why did we let Bill Gates control the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Orwell and Hemingway? See screenshot below:
'... a owner ...' PUH-lease!
Arrrgggh!
The faint thudding you can hear is the sound of a brick wall not crumbling as my head hits it repeatedly.
Categories: Words and language
And on Plaxo
Often operating as Business analysts or Project managers, Bridgers are committed a philosophy that says "1+1>2" and going the extra yard to speak simple English, Spanish, French, German . . more 
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7 responses so far ↓
Hairy Farmer Family // March 13, 2009 at 1:28 pm |
I’ve run into similar Word horrors. It does rather make you lose the will to live!
benwarsop // March 13, 2009 at 5:34 pm |
I’m not sure if it upsets me because I care about the English language, or if it upsets me because I care about good software development. Both, probably.
Cheers m’dear.
B
Solnushka // March 13, 2009 at 9:40 pm |
God forbid you had tried to make that a non-defining clause with a comma. It’s one of my pet peeves that Word insists that one can only use ‘that’ in such cases.
Ben Warsop // March 13, 2009 at 11:34 pm |
Well quite. Though every way you look at it there are infelicities:
… a resource which are …
… a owner …
… a resource for site owners, which is…
Head.
Brick wall.
Head.
Brick wall.
So glad it’s not just me.
B
Dave // March 15, 2009 at 4:40 am |
I forget what the word was, but I once spelled a word X way. The little red squiggle appeared to indicate misspelling. I right clicked and selected the only one alternative, spelling Y. Again, the red squiggle appeared. It’s suggestion was spelling X. It was an infinite loop of incorrect spellings.
Ben Warsop // March 15, 2009 at 9:57 am |
Heh heh!
You’ve prompted me to look up the Easter Eggs that used to be in MS Word. If you were using US English in Word 97 and typed “I want to kill Bill Gates” and then looked it up in the thesaurus, you’d get the response “I’ll drink to that”. It seems this worked for any phrase starting “I want to…” Unfortunately the few internet sources I found don’t say what happened when you looked up the key phrases, which is annoying now that no-one has that particular version of the software.
I also discovered that if you type rand=() in word it will insert random text. Only it’s not random at all, it is the quick brown fox pwning the lazy dog. FAIL. If I could generate lorem ipsum with a few key strokes that would make me very happy. Thank heavens for the lorem ipsum generator: http://www.lipsum.com/
Cheers.
Ben
Singing Librarian // April 15, 2009 at 3:29 pm |
Only just seen this…
Eugh. Yuck. If I wasn’t so darned tired, I’d bash my head against a wall with you, but I don’t have enough energy!