Beware: Spellcheck at your (dis)service

I got this rather cryptic message from a friend the other day;

“Meet you at Mama’s Park.”

Where on earth was Mama’s Park, I wondered. Was it the name of some public garden where mums met their bawling brats, letting them shout out their lungs while the mothers had a cosy chitchat under a tree? Then ping, another message hit my inbox.

“Majaz Park.” Aha! Now I got it! But the next message again put me into a spin.

“Today — feverish.”

I immediately shot out a text.

“If you aren’t feeling well, we can always meet another day.”

Then the sound of the ping came again — a message with a smiley.

“Five-ish. Stupid spellcheck!”

I’m sure you all have received or sent messages like this, where what you type is corrected by the extra-vigilant spellcheck. Unless you read and correct your message, it sallies forth to the intended recipient, causing confusion. To me, belonging to a generation where there were no such props, the world was once far simpler. It was divided into two camps; the ones who could spell and the ones who couldn’t, until spellcheck came along and made a mess of everything.

I remember a famed primary school teacher from my time — a Miss Rhondo. She was an institution in herself and rapped hard on the knuckles of the child who didn’t learn his or her spellings for the week. Those were the good old days when teachers could give students a rap without the entire school, police and educational authorities coming after them. Every week we had to learn a list of words — days of the week, months of the year, names of animals or birds, professions. We were presented with this list every Thursday and had to memorise the words and be tested on them the following Tuesday. In Miss Rhondo’s class, erasers weren’t allowed. You either knew the word or you didn’t. No guessing.

Well, I’m not sure whether those old-fashioned methods worked and made us all better spellers. But the ancient, grey-haired Miss Rhondo was highly respected by her colleagues and our parents. She had zero tolerance for poor spelling.

But times have changed. Spellcheck is there by your side, like a genial Jeeves, ever ready to give you a gentle hint when you err. Except of course poor Jeeves has lost his marbles and often makes nonsense of sense. Foreign names seem to be his pet peeve. He doesn’t realise young and old alike liberally sprinkle their sentences with words from their own language. For example, the word “khalas”, so common in this region, which means “finished” or “the show’s over” is corrected to Khalsa, a martial community of the Sikhs.

In another message, when I used the word “chutti” which means “holiday”, it was mysteriously changed to Bhutto!

Abbreviations are special favourite for the virtual-red correcting pen. I’ve read enough and heard enough about teenagers’ use of abbreviation and the subsequent downward spiral in thought and language. But when I try it, spellcheck seems to be at extra attention, so that I am forced to retype the words in full. When I write ‘Cmg tmrw evng’, it corrects automatically to ‘Cog tar egg’!

Now, how can anyone make sense of this odd sentence? Does old Jeeves have some kind of invidious design to just correct people like me who are not quite young and make us stick to our old ways? It’s just as if Miss Rhondo is back in full swing, ruler and cane et al!

No, I am not deriding this very useful tool in toto. It does help in dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s. But like all tools or applications, it needs careful handling and a certain amount of vigilance, and should be used with discretion. The sign “Use with Caution” which is seen on certain types of machinery may just as well apply to spellcheck.

Padmini B. Sankar is a Dubai-based freelance writer. You can follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/paddersatdubai