Thursday, March 8, 2012

Change of Pace

I'm sick of writing updates on my writing, and I needed a break from editing. I'm sitting out on the back porch, enjoying the wind and the warm air (it's 67...aaaahhhh).

I was just working through my edits when I noticed a word my spell check thought was a typo. Sometimes I'm grateful for the squiggly red lines, other times I'm puzzled by them.

For instance, the other night I added the word "kvetch" to the story. Spell check thinks that's a dandy word. I was surprised. I don't know why, but after getting angry red squiggles on other words that I figured were normal, everyday words, I had to laugh at a Yiddish word being perfectly acceptable.

The word I just saw that made me come over and write this was "snarky." And even the Blogger spell check doesn't like it. Hah! I thought everyone knew what snarky meant. Dictionary.com thinks it's a word. Huh.

Other puzzling words I've used that my spell check dictionary tried to reject:

  • Hoity-toity
  • grimoire
  • churros (Come on, it's a tasty dessert. Everyone should know what they are! Am I right?)
  • itty-bitty (it actually suggested "titty-bitty", which is just insulting)
  • nitty-gritty
  • Tiki (suggested Wiki)
  • half-assed (suggested half-asses, for some inexplicable reason)
  • googling (suggested goggling, which I regularly do when performing internet searches, I suppose)
  • patootie (suggested patriotic. Hah!)
  • petroglyphs
  • rinkydink
  • TiVo (suggested Tito)
  • yadda, as in yadda yadda yadda (it suggested Saddam. Gaddafi was the fourth choice on the selection list. I kid you not.)
  • looky-loos
  • it recognized Angkor, but not Wat. What's up with that?
  • armoire
  • riff-raff (it suggested riff-riff, which doesn't make any sense)
  • doozy
  • it accepted donuts, but not donut 

And there you have it. There were a few others, but they were legitimately words I didn't think would be in the dictionary, like proper nouns, and the like.

 Fun with Spell Check! Back to work now.

1 comment:

  1. I keep trying to imagine sentences that contain as many of the above non-spell-check-approved words as possible in a dastardly plot to make my computer up at work explode tomorrow, thereby freeing me to go home and write. (Of course some could argue that I could be writing right now, rather than just being a looky-loo and reading things other people have written, but they are just being a patootie.

    Sorry, I keep giggling over "titty bitty."

    ReplyDelete

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