#spellchecker

FFS it just told me flushable, repositioned, and scathed aren't words. But get this, if I click suggestions for 'scathed' it's like 'oh but unscathed is definitely a word. scathed tho? wtf is that are you stupid'

I’m doing some research about The Anarchy (one of the historical backgrounds for “A Song of Ice and Fire”, as well as Ken Follett’s 1989 “Pillars of the Earth” and George Shipway’s 1969 “Knight in Anarchy”.

(Shipway’s novel is worth finding not just because it’s grimdark long before the term was ever imagined, but because of the current GoT resonance. Its hero refuses to acknowledge that the charismatic overlord he honours and loves has dangerous flaws, and follows him down a spiral of tyranny, slaughter and finally madness until the world falls in around them. Tropes repeat, and seeing how different stories treat them is both entertainment and education.) 

Last night when I saved an on-line article as a Word docx file, the spellchecker automatically found and flagged a single “spelling error”.

It wasn’t an error.

I don’t know enough about software programming to guess at why this particular tagging happened, and though I’ve used hoard / horde often enough I can’t recall seeing it before.

Homophones - words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings - are awkward enough in speech and can be even more problematic when written down since, as shown here, if the software says “wrong” and the word’s unfamiliar enough, there’s a risk of making a mistake. (Voice-to-text makes things even more interesting...)

Peal of bells, peel of oranges; breech of a gun, breach in a wall...

“I’ve seen the scene where he sees her seize the reins of power; she starts her reign of fear with a rain of fire.”

Pronunciation and accent can help or hinder clarity; @dduane​ said “Ouch!”

There’s a long, long list of homophones, usually made clear by context, though it doesn’t prevent high-profile mistakes. For example, this isn’t UK vs US spelling, it’s a blunder...

I have a private feeling that “The New Kid - Tony Stark takes reins at 21” and “The New King - Tony Stark reigns at 21″ were both considered for cover copy and, when the decision was made, one vital word got mixed up.

A hoard of coins is correct, so is a horde of barbarians, but there’s no such thing as a horde of coins or a hoard of barbarians.

Here’s my rule of thumb - “hoard” means a collection of inanimate objects, usually hidden - treasure, money, foodstuffs - while “horde” means an unruly mob of living creatures - insects, animals, humans.

If there are exceptions, I can’t think of them right now, though to add more complication the real-but-uncommon word “hording” means people gathering together - “Trek fans were hording at one end of the hall, Wars fans at the other” -while more commonly, (compulsive) “hoarding” is a disorder but “a hoarding” is an advertising billboard. Again, those can all be told apart in context, though Google has just shown me cross-spelling errors for each and every one...

If you’ve written something that you’re sure is correct but your spellchecker claims isn’t, get a second opinion by opening a tab or (preferably) pulling down a dictionary.

Mum and Dad gave me this one when I was quite small...

...but forgot to mention I didn’t need to read it from cover to cover. I did that very thing over the next couple of weeks, with the result that...

Well, not quite that bad, at least once the vexatious entertainment concomitant with exercising my enhanced lexical prowess wore off.

Also people started throwing things at me, and the things started getting heavy.

But when I write that an artisan is a wright, I’m right.

No matter who says otherwise...

The truth is your grammar and understanding of jargon can still be bad, depending on which school you attended and if you’ve had good teachers.

When I was in primary school, we had great lessons on spelling and learning word meanings. But we didn’t receive much lessons on learning English grammar. When I reached high school, I received great feedback on grammar rules. But English lessons in high school focused more on Shakespearean English and English from novels, instead of business English. And business English is what you need to succeed in work in an English speaking country.

When you start work in Australia, your colleagues normally don’t have time to teach you English. Your workplace might be understaffed or busy. So you have to learn English in your spare time off work.

When I attended university, there were tutors to help with fact checking. But when it came to checking spelling and grammar, you were on your own. All I and my fellow students had was Microsoft Word spellcheck on computer to fix spelling and grammar. And while the spellchecker was good, it still makes mistakes.

Whilst not writing new Greenlandic lessons, I know - shame on me, I found some little new pieces that may be interesting for you.

1. The Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation (KNR TV) has a 12-video playlist with some notes on Kalaallisut grammar in Greenlandic. It is worth a look and it is good practice for your listening comprehension of Greenlandic: Oqaasilerisa.

2. Be a spectator of language policy and development as new words are approved by the the ‘Language Secretariat of Greenland’. See the newly added and approved words on this page.

3. Download the Greenlandic spellchecker from the Greenlandic Secreteriat.

4. Download articles on Greenland(ic) from the Greenlandic Secretariat.

5. Browse the Greenlandic Secretariat's dictionary via English, Danish, Greenlandic and have it read the words out to you. (It also works for morphemes.)

6. In general, just browse the webpage of the ‘Language Secretariat of Greenland’ and find many more useful language tools, news, information, publications etc.

8. Hear Greenlandic podcasts of the KNR TV news, or browse the main page.

9. See this forum on Duolingo on a Duolingo course for Greenlandic and pay attention to the links provided there.

10. See these posts on Duolingo as language lessons for Greenlandic by ‘skuggstralar’.

“When it comes to grammar checking, Grammarly is the premium tool for it. It’s a proprietary tool, and it was among the first one to make a mark as a web-based Grammar checking tool. Then there is LanguageTool that is/was open source, made in Germany and offers hosted service for free or for a price (you get additional features). LanguageTool was acquired a couple of years back and since then it’s privacy policy has changed as it processes data on US servers, instead of European ones.”

I’m trying out Harper and although it works fine, it is a very new product (less than a year old), so there are some improvements that can be made. For example, I’d like to see autocorrection rules we can add ourselves for whenever I type ‘teh’ to be changed to ‘the’. But it is being updated regularly, I see.

Right now too it only supports English (but being open source I think that will change soon).

It has plugins for Firefox, Chrome, Obsidian, WordPress, and it can be integrated into various code editors as well as into JavaScript/TypeScript/Rust codebases.

There are no mobile apps as the view is that most keyboards have their own built-in spell and grammar checkers.

But the privacy-first approach does mean no data going into someone’s cloud, and does mean also better speed and even working offline. That would also mean right now no syncing of personal dictionaries across devices, but I’m sure that can be added in time to use Nextcloud, Dropbox, and other personal cloud services.