WHEN YOU'RE SURE YOU'RE SURE

One of the less-than-delightful features of the computer age is spellcheck, along with its companion grammarcheck. Which are both disabled on this computer, because my spellung und grammatik are spendious.
Just splendious!

A friend justifiably belly-aches: "Does anyone else become irrationally angry whenever Microsoft word makes a bullshit grammar check? Such as claiming a sentence is a fragment when it's a complete sentence?"

Mm, yeah.


For me this checking business became an issue early on. When writing essays on this blog, English is the main language I use, because I wish to be read by the widest possible audience. But Hebrew (often giving the Ashkenazic pronunciation), Arabic, Yiddish, Dutch, Flemish, Bargoens, German, French, Slavic slang, and Scandinavian jargon of various stripes have made appearances. Plus Latin, Indonesian, Tagalog, Yue, and several phonetic transcriptions of of various tongues, some of my own devising.
And of course the British spelling of certain words.
As well as unique coinages.

Plus sentence fragments. Fragments, good. Points often made.
Correction quite unnecessary, audience are unstupid.


SPLENDIOUS IDIOSYNCRACIES

Clippy the 'Helpful" Pop-up Editor assumes, rightly, that most people are idiots. But some of us aren't. My friend earns his living writing, and probably knows what he's doing. Another friend is battling her way through academia and will eventually end up with tenure, and several others are multi-lingual. They all at times will talk in tongues.

Moments when Clippy should go piss up a rope.

Rabbinical and scientific English is notorious for having lacquer on Clippy's jejeune and irritating didacticism. One of Clippy's questions really should be: "I see you are using a literary expression from the Code of Hammurabi - are you SURE your readers are unstupid enough to 'get' it?(*)"
And similar queries in that vein.

It would be splendious.
Truly.




NOTE: The Code of Hammurabi was written over three and a half millennia ago in Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language, which despite its antiquity shows a clear relation to all the more modern Semitic lashoins.
Particularly for bright-eyed bushy-tailed amateur linguists.
It is fascinating and well-worth looking into.

Also, "auto-correct" leads to murder and memes.


Having lacquer on: Er lak aan hebben; a Dutch expression which indicates that one shall completely ignore something, like laws, rules, stipulations or conditions, picayune objections by Clippy or others, and in fact sneers at something completely and in summa omnia summa.




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