Aging My Way
With all this talk being thrown around about artificial intelligence, better known simply as AI, I’ve come to realize one of its uses has been both the savior and bane of my life for 40 years or more. I’m talking about Spell Check.
In the early years, it simply noted misspelled words; today it goes so far as to question context and meaning of words. I like it when it catches my typo gremlins, but not when it automatically changes a word I truly meant, sometimes even refusing to let me change it back.
This mostly happens when I text — and the most frequent irritation is when Spell Check changes Dawn to David. And just yesterday, I typed that I was back safely after taking my dog Scamp for a walk and that he had pooed. AI didn’t like pooed, so changed it to posed.
In 2020, Google wrote of its Spell Check Program: “The tool uses a deep neural net with 680 million parameters to better understand the context of misspelled words. It runs in 3 milliseconds — faster than one flap of a hummingbird’s wings.”
Now I don’t understand some of that, but I do know that some hummingbirds flap their wings 80 times a second. Then again, I don’t understand how that is possible either.
In my imagination, I see Spell Check and Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, coming head-to-head in a face-off.
Carroll, whose work was published in the 1800s, used such meaningless words as brillig, frumious, slythy, mimsy, burble, chortle, galumph, snark, frabjous, and burble – and meant them. Some of those words can now be found in dictionaries, like Jabberwocky, the name of a nonsensical poem by Carrol. Today, Jabberwocky, according to an Oxford Dictionary, means invented or meaningless language.
Will Spell Check block the creation of new words from joining our language – or will there be another author like Carroll to fight and win the head-to-head battle against the mighty AI tool?
This curious writer wants to know. Otherwise, I just want Spell Check to continue catching my typo gremlins, but to acknowledge I meant what I said.
That’s not asking too much. Is it?
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
Pat Bean's blog 
Enjoyed reading your take on spell checking. I find it is handy but: spell checking checks, and then I have to check, what spell checking checked. 😊 Hope that makes sense. lol
Yup, Greco. It’s like having to edit the editor. Thanks for commenting.
You are so right about Carroll, I imagine he would have had a heck of a time!
Poet John Milton also created a host of new words, including pandemonium. Thanks for commenting, Dawn.