North Coast Connections

FROM AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION ONLINE JOURNAL
* A witness was named Mr. Piscatelli. The spell checker changed the last name throughout the document into "post-coital."
* Some newspapers automatically track "today", "tomorrow" and "yesterday" by tagging the text to the day of the week. Right before Easter, one story appeared with references to Holy Yesterday and Good Today instead of Holy Thursday and Good Friday.
* A legal secretary who didn't know the proper name used "Dear Sir or Madam," but the autotext feature turned it into, "Dear Sir or Madman."
* Spell-check suggested changing a first name of Myron to "moron."
* "Incontinence" instead of "inconvenience" as in: "We sincerely apologize for any incontinence caused by our delay."
* I had a client with the first name Trish. My spell-check kept trying to tell me that it should be "trash."
* While drafting a demand letter for a nonpaying client, to my amusement, spell-check always attempted to replace the customer’s name—Rodney—with the word "rodent."
* In the early days of voice-recognition software, the program had faithfully replaced the dictated "Alzheimer’s disease" with "old-timer’s disease" throughout the report.
* When "does not" was typed "doe snot," our spell-checker let it through without question. Of course, that may be because we are in the middle of deer-hunting country.

FROM OTHER SOURCES
I was surprised that a Google search didn't turn up any other sources of spell check humor except for one or two isolated rants. Who knew that the king compilers of this brand of techno humor would be lawyers? What's next, hip hop accountants? The only isolated item of interest I could find was some Microsoft conspiracy theorist who claimed there was an Easter Egg hidden inside of MS Word that you could find by typing "zzzz" (without the quotes) and right clicking on the squiggly red line. It didn't work. In fact, Word recognized zzzz as a legitimate word and didn't even flag it.

FROM SLINKYCITY.COM
OK, my Google search did turn up this spell check poem that is listed on dozens of sites. Since Slinkycity came out on top of the Google-heap, they get the credit:

This Spell Checker Poem ...
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

* * * * * * *

Sea hew lighter !!

Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com