Confessional; a.k.a. "Did you mean serotonin?"

[mollyringle]

I tend to think myself immune to the need for spell-check, but I do occasionally run it anyway. Tonight I found that in my most recent novel-in-progress, I misspelled the following words:

serotonin
idiosyncrasies
exhilaration

My one consolation is that Microsoft Word didn't know how to spell them either--that is, it had no suggestions on correcting them; it just "knew" they were wrong. I had to Google them to find the right spellings.

Comments

[rachel2205.livejournal.com]

MS couldn't spell exhilaration? What is the world coming to?! Word's spellcheck is pretty dire, though.

My problem as well is that my thesis obviously contains a lot in not-modern-English, so spell-checking involves a lot of clicking the "ignore" button!

[mollyringle.livejournal.com]

I know; I only got one letter wrong; you'd think they could guess at the right word!

Hah, I bet your list of added words to the spellcheck would confound most of us. :)

Oh Yeah..

[thomas-a-kempis.livejournal.com]

I saw an obvious instance in a web article by the Rasmussen Report the other day and laughed. Microsoft is good at making money and not much else...likely you will be better than spell check for years to come.

+

Re: Oh Yeah..

[mollyringle.livejournal.com]

The difficulties of telling a computer how to understand and use any human language seemed to me, in my small amount of linguistic training, to be far beyond current capabilities. I feel deeply sorry for those who make it their work right now. :)

[terrylj.livejournal.com]

MS Word can't spell bureaucracy either. Well, either that, or I had mangled it so badly that it didn't recognize the word. ;)

[mollyringle.livejournal.com]

Heheh. I was only one letter off with all three of those words, so I think it's just being dense.

[kali-kali.livejournal.com]

I'm constantly annoyed about MS Word's inability to recognize possessive-ization of words it is told to add to the dictionary or ignore. For instance, if I were talking about (as has happened in my papers on Central Asia), the president of Kazakhstan, Nazarbayev, MS Word wouldn't like his name. Once I tell them to ignore it, they will, but they won't ignore "Nazarbayev's" automatically, which I believe they should. Grrr.

[mollyringle.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I hate that too. How hard could it be to add the programming needed to recognize such a thing?

[astroman-rich.livejournal.com]

To heck with MS Word - I want to know about the plot of any novel that mentions serotonin. ;-)

[mollyringle.livejournal.com]

It's only one occurrence. :) My main teenage girl character is into psychology, so she mentions it in passing.

[kalquessa.livejournal.com]

I can never spell "serotonin" without looking it up. Some part of my brain insists that one of those vowels is absolutely an A, despite all evidence to the contrary.

[mollyringle.livejournal.com]

Exactly; I spelled it "seratonin." And actually there are quite a few Google pages with that spelling, so it's like the experts aren't even sure.