Beware spell-check, example # 1,453. (Watch out for grammar-check, too.)
A story in today’s newspaper told of a Bismarck, ND, man, Chester Nelson, who had the good fortune of spotting a couple of whooping cranes while he had his camera along.
The 67-year-old Nelson was duck hunting Oct. 1 on land he has hunted since 1951. In the rolling Coteau Hills 14 miles southwest of Kenmare, N.D., Nelson spotted the cranes feeding in a durham field.
One word in that paragraph just jumped out at this farmboy: durham.
Durham is a county in England, a city in North Carolina, or a breed of cattle. I’m 99 and 44/100 percent sure that the field these cranes were spotted in was a durum field—durum being a type of hard wheat used to make pasta.
Spell-checking software is a wonderful thing; I use it constantly. But I don’t rely on it without question, because it doesn’t know when you’ve used the wrong word entirely. Durham sounds like the right word for that article, and they spelled it correctly, but it was not the right word, and I couldn’t help groaning when I saw it.
While we’re on the subject, keep in mind that you can’t always trust the judgement of grammar-checking software either. Microsoft Word’s grammar checker lets some extraordinary gaffes slip through. Here’s some example text you can use to check this yourself. Copy the following text into a new Word document and launch the spelling and grammar check:
Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. Updating of brand image bad for processes in one company and many companies.
According to Word, nothing is wrong with that paragraph, which is taken from a longer document that demonstrates how bad Word’s grammar checker is. (That document (available here) was created by Sandeep Krishnamurthy, a teacher at the University of Washington.)
It comes down to this: Go ahead and use the tools, but you have to be aware of their limitations. They can help, but there is no replacement for learning how to spell, and what the rules of English grammar are.
Roy Jacobsen
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Not that I'm the Grammar Police or anything.
I can see why you stumbled over that, though. Might have been better to repeat it, I think.