Spellcheck
I’m a book juggler. I read part of one book, set it down, pick up something else, switch, etc. It’s not that I’m a victim of a short-attention-span society. It’s the result of grad school, where learning how to book juggle is a matter of survival, and heaven help you if you can’t do it.
So, in addition to about three or four other things, I’m reading Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. I’m not far enough into it to tell you why it’s a Bad Year, but I’ve read enough to come across this:
“Spellcheck has no mind of its own, I say. If you are prepared to hand it over to spellcheck to run your life, you might as well throw dice.”
So I began thinking about what would happen if Spellcheck took over the world, and edited everything. Shakespeare’s verse wouldn’t scan! Also, what about all of his wonderful Renaissance English words? Like “rampallion” (a ruffian, a ne’er do well, a baddie)? And I know one thing: my dissertation would probably just explode when touched by the power of Spellcheck. I used so many Renaissance pamphlets about fire-breathing babies and gruesome murders that my dissertation is littered with words like “badlie,” “a bundle of sweetnes,” and “ridiculous toyes.”
There would be no Kwiki Mart, or any faux-antique stores like “Ye Olde Shoppe” (fyi: do you know that “ye” is pronounced like “the”?). Joss Whedon wouldn’t be nearly so funny. Advertisements everywhere would bow to the will of Spellcheck—and that might be a good thing.
(just the part about advertisements would be a good thing, though the price of a Spellcheck Dictatorship would be too high to pay for the benefit of having less tacky adverts)
I heard a rumor that Joss Whedon named his child Squire, so I contributed to the billion dollar legacy by looking it up on Google. Maybe it isn’t as weird to think Spellcheck will rule the world one day, when in present day, we are slaves to knowledge at a quick hit of a button. We probably wouldn’t depend as much on reading and juggling four to five books at a time because our vocabulary would easily be replaced with the word that fits. We’d be a dull world that is, nothing to discover when it is easily “right clicked “and even “synonymed”. Spell check would have erased any progress or mutation of the English language that makes it so unique. We’d lose a lot of majors depended on that specialty. Wow, not that I think about it, Spell check would have screwed us over worse than a bias in a history book! But, Alas, our names would have saved us, because those can simply be “ignored” and we’d still have the likes of…Don Quioxte’s Sancho Panza—-the Squire to remember.
All thanks to Joss Whedon!