April 28, 2015--Auto-Correct

When working on yesterday's blog about student achievement tests, I followed my regular routine. This involves going to blogger.com and typing the text and then, after cleaning it up, publishing it.

But while typing, for the first time, I paid close attention to the spell-check and auto-correct functions built into the Blogger system and had some fun with what came up, especially via auto-correct.

I am a notoriously poor speller (the loser of many third-grade spelling bees) and wasn't at all surprised to notice how many words were underlined with red dots, indicating a misspelling. So, as usual, I clicked on the word and a list of spelling options popped up. If a poor speller, I am a good reader and was quickly able to pick from the list of suggestions the spelling I wanted. Spell-check for me is liberating, my favorite feature of word-processing.

There were misspellings such as--

Hundrads rather than hundreds
Unpecking instead of unpacking
Snach rather than snatch

Much more fun was what auto-correct imposed. And I mean "imposed" since the auto in auto-correct means what it says--it automatically changes misspelled words to correctly-spelled ones. But some of the suggestions/corrections, though they make no contextual sense, turn out to be unintentionally amusing.

For example, just now, when attempting to spell correctly correctly, I typed correlty which was auto-changed to courtly. Thus the originally-typed phrase became--[It] changes misspelled words to courtly spelled words. Cool, no?

Here are a few examples from yesterday's bog--

I typed taest when I meant tests and via auto-correct wound up with yeast. So my corrected sentence became, "Whose fault is it that we have all this yeast?"

I meant to type values but wrote valus which was transformed into vales so my new sentence included, "guided by meritocratic vales." Sort of poetic.

When attempting curriculum I mistyped it curricum and the corrected sentence included, "the controversial Common Core currycomb." 

I had no idea what a currycomb was so I googled that and found it is a type of comb used to curry a horse. "Groom a horse," the second definition informed me.

What is the etymology of that, I wondered? And what is the relationship between the spice curry and the curry that means horse grooming?

Etymologically, I learned, the curry that applies to horses derives from the Old French correier, which means to put in order. Whereas the spice curry comes from the late 16th century Ceylonese Tamil word kari.

Auto-correct, incidentally, kept changing correier, which I methodically spelled correctly, to courier. In fact, it just did it again. Additionally,  I was so flustered with the correier-courier business that I misspelling horses (orses) and wound up with roses. I like it, but go figure.

Auto-correct took me so far afield that I forgot what I had meant to say about high-stakes testing. No matter since I now know about currycombs.

But then, I mused, what would spell-check and auto-correct do with the first sentence of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake?

a way a lone a last a loved a long the/riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth castle and Environs

Number 23 could have been me at PS 244