Sunday 29 April 2007

You Seem To Be Writing A Letter

I quite like AutoCorrect, so I leave it turned on in Word, but it has a tendency to do strange things both to academicese and to Latin, and some of its predictions are bizarre. I can see why it might think, on seeing me type Satur, that I want it to fill in 'Saturday', so the little yellow box it hovers invitingly over my cursor is quite benign (though of course it's wrong, I'm typing Saturnian medium). But the suggestion Office 2004 Test Drive User at the sight of me typing offi is much stranger.

In fact, I was typing officiant laetis ne frugibus herbae, 'lest weeds should harm the well-being of the crops', and I suppose there's no way it could have known that, until they start teaching Word for Mac the classics.* (Roll on that day: a little paper-clip could pop up saying You seem to be writing a monograph on the materiality of political space in Vergil's Georgics. Would you like some help? OH YES, PLEASE.)

*There's no 'Latin' option in the spell-checker dictionary languages either. FOR SHAME, WORD.

1 comment:

Cathy Butler said...

(Roll on that day: a little paper-clip could pop up saying You seem to be writing a monograph on the materiality of political space in Vergil's Georgics. Would you like some help? OH YES, PLEASE.)

ROFL!