It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: Microsoft Word is a monster. No, I’m not here to complain about our formatting fights, or our lovers’ tiffs over grammar (although, for such a shady bastard, it sure can tell its “that”s from its “which”s), I’m talking about its attack on language itself, on the very existence of words.
For better or for worse, Word has become a universal standard, and as far as common knowledge is concerned, what it says goes. Therefore, when everybody’s best friend/worst enemy Mr. Spell Check refuses to recognize a word, it becomes, in a very real way, not a word. Of course, some contemporary language just hasn’t been officially inducted into the dictionary yet. Others things… well, there can be serious culture politics involved.
Noche was kind enough to start off the list the other day with “intersexual”. After working on a review of Avatars of Story, I’d like to add to that list both “ludology” and “narratology”. What missing word makes you shake your head in shame?
August 25th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Here’s something fun to do if, like me, you use a Mac and do most of your typing in programs that support the systemwide spell checking utility (ie. anything but Word). Open your Home folder, then Library -> Spelling. Take the “en” file and drop it onto TextEdit, or your favorite text editor. (The file may be broken up by a nonsense character that you have to find and replace.) The contents of this file are all the words you added to your spell checker. Here’re mine:
hashbrowns
y’all
opposingly
agora
upwelling
Bashô
Heraclitus
Picasso
auteur
Michelangelo
unsuppressible
inconsolate
waka
tanka
renga
haikai
Shintô
Nintendo
Nietzsche
karaoké
Toyama
flyswatter
Dionysian
moshing
folktale
unwinnable
disconfirming
priceyness
Hypoxia
Okinawa
eyepatch
layabouts
pm
self-justificatory
enjambed
Fukuoka
theodicy
theodicies
co-owner
Filipina
quesadillas
Yum
koans
samsara
abiogenesis
googly
Leibniz
Schopenhauer
Bodhidharma
Raphael’s
autodidactic
Furman
Peripatetics
Platonists
Platonist
breakages
undichotomized
undergirds
Blyth
Masaoka
hokku
Meiji
hiraku
kireji
kigo
Shinkokinshû
Blyth’s
kakekotoba
haniwa
desperations
nihilo
Takaoka
elites
Tetris
ain’t
justificatory
Rawls
Locke
Kant
ataraxia
Fukuyama
Jainists
archrival
celadon
geomancy
bollocks
theremin
romanized
unresolvable
Warhol
Duchamp
Manichean
gravitas
Anathematic
peacenik
Spinoza
Hume
Hume’s
Heidegger
August 25th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
… there can be serious culture politics involved.
Yep, I think so, too. I could just envision old conservative types convening in committee to discuss which terms will get sanctioned and which ones won’t.
Also, sometimes authors make up their own words. I always get a kick out of that. Sometimes they’re lame or clunky, but sometimes they’re good ones. The coolest improvised word that I’ve come across thus far is “technophilosophy.” I know Sherry Turkle has used it before, although I don’t know if she actually coined it. I do know that I love using it. :)
August 27th, 2006 at 9:49 am
After some recent typing, I’d also like to add “transgendered” to the list.
Wow, Carl, that is a funky list. I love it when singular forms are okay with Word, but not plurals. Like quesadilla, apparently. One: fine. Two: not cool. Also, there’s something kind of wonderful about Kant and Tetris, side by side.
August 30th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
I think Word’s spellchecker is the wrong target for your ire, since its “dictionary” is rather deliberately limited. A better choice is, say, Merriam-Webster, the true arbiters of the English language. :-)
September 1st, 2006 at 7:19 am
Except that most people, on a day to day basis, don’t use the dictionary, or, say, the OED (which dorks like me would consider the real decider). They just type this into spell check.