Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” contains a sentence fragment, which, in context, constitutes an answer to some such question as ‘what are we on about, eh?’ Typed it in today, and had occasion to consult MS-Word about spelling overall. And no way to do that without getting two-cents worth about grammar. So what do you suppose the Beast of Redmond thinks we should do about “That which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of his human nature”? Answer: “consider revising.”
{ 11 comments }
bad Jim 02.28.04 at 11:04 am
And what is else not to be overcome?
Patrick Nielsen Hayden 02.28.04 at 1:12 pm
Not to spoil a perfectly fine bit of Word-bashing, but in fact it’s perfectly possible to get it to spell-check without also being blessed with its (often batty) opinions of your grammar and style.
Just unclick “Check Grammar With Spelling” in the spelling-and-grammar section of Options.
As it was said by the prophets, Word is a perfectly good word-processing program, so long as you clean and gut it first.
Matt McG 02.28.04 at 1:32 pm
The truly blessed use LaTeX.
[for ’tis a thing of beauty]
jholbo 02.28.04 at 1:49 pm
Yeah, even as I was typing this little post I knew in my heart that I could surely have done something to prevent the whole travesty. But something there is in my human nature – a sullen, essential orneriness – that keeps me from adjusting my preferences so that life goes better. Some sort of lesson in that.
Hal 02.28.04 at 2:19 pm
As others have noted, the grammar checking can be turned off. A much more serious problem with current versions of Word is its thesaurus, which has been bowdlerized (since Word 97 I believe; I haven’t checked the Office 2003 version, but I can’t imagine they’ve had a change of heart), so that offensive words like “whore” or even “obscene” are no longer available. Try it yourself. That’s one of the reasons I still have WordPerfect installed on my machine (one of the others is the excellent “Reveal Codes” feature) and why I’ve had to resort as well to third-party dictionaries (WordWeb is a handy one).
Sarek 02.28.04 at 3:24 pm
While we’re on the subject of Word-bashing, be sure to dig up Louis Menand’s wonderful New Yorker article on the perils of “end matter” from October. He’s dead-on on the near-impossibility of doing footnotes in Word–as the academics who frequent (and write) this site are no doubt aware.
One excerpt:
Finally, there is the moment when you realize that your notes are starting to appear in 12-pt. Courier New. Word, it seems, has, at some arbitrary point in the proceedings, decided that although you have been typing happily away in Times New Roman, you really want to be in the default font of the original document. You are confident that you can lick this thing: you painstakingly position your cursor in the Endnotes window (not the text!, where irreparable damage may occur) and click Edit, then the powerful Select All; you drag the arrow to Normal (praying that your finger doesn’t lose contact with the mouse, in which case the window will disappear, and trying not to wonder what the difference between Normal and Clear Formatting might be) and then, in the little window to the right, to Times New Roman. You triumphantly click, and find that you are indeed back in Times New Roman but that all your italics have been removed. What about any of this can be considered “high-speed�
Walt Pohl 02.28.04 at 3:58 pm
Ooo, he’s gonna get you now. He didn’t become worth 50 billion dollars for nothing…
Russell Arben Fox 02.28.04 at 4:07 pm
Hal’s right: just use WordPerfect people.
Hal 02.28.04 at 4:50 pm
Russell,
Not only do I use Wordperfect, I still use Wordperfect 6.2 for DOS (though I have a current Windows version installed as well; all versions of WP have the “reveal codes” feature). I run Windows 98SE, which has an excellent implementation of DOS, and WP-Dos 6.2 is still the fastest, most writer-friendly word processor ever compiled (including an excellent dictionary). It will install and run well under Windows XP, but I wouldn’t recommend it to younger users who have grown up knowing only operating systems with a GUI.
Curtiss Leung 02.28.04 at 5:42 pm
TeX and LaTeX are the best—if you already have clean copy. I have to confess it’s been a while since I used LaTeX, so perhaps there’s some freeware utility that can spell check a TeX/LaTeX doc without barfing on all the directives. To me at least, though, no other font looks as good as Computer Modern Roman.
As for the MS-Word grammar checker, turn it off. It is junk up with which one should not put.
Kieran Healy 02.28.04 at 9:02 pm
so perhaps there’s some freeware utility that can spell check a TeX/LaTeX doc without barfing on all the directives.
On the Mac, it’s called Excalibur. I use Emacs (on my Mac), which comes with ispell. On Windows, I think WinEdt has a spell checker built in.
As a further geeky aside, I am waiting for the day that Excalibur becomes a Services application. Never mind what that means.
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