Word

I recently read a book about philosophy. One chapter touched on the difficulties that software developers have encountered while trying to create artificial intelligence. One of their major hurdles has been programming a computer (or robot or other machine) to understand human speech. I understood the explanation in the book well enough to read the chapter without confusion, but I doubt I could repeat it. Suffice it to say that language is much more complicated than it seems and that tonal and contextual nuances in speech can drastically change the meaning of a word or sentence.

As much as I complain about it (which I frequently do), this knowledge gives me a new respect for the programmers who created the grammar-checker in Microsoft Word. It’s not perfectly accurate. It has warned me about sentence fragments when I didn’t have any, and it frequently points out nonexistent subject-verb agreement errors. I even got it into an infinite loop once where it convinced me to correct what it thought was an error only to tell me to correct the correction back to the original, which it thought was still wrong. I realize now what an impressive bit of programming it really is.

However, Word’s grammar-checker is not perfectly reliable. It misses errors all the time because it does not understand the contextual facets of language. It is not a substitute for old-fashioned proofreading.

At work the other day, I received an informational email about a series of health and safety videos available to employees and accessible through the organization’s intranet. One of those videos was about breathing and asthma. It was titled “Breath Easy.” The person who created the title failed to add an “e,” and Word didn’t catch the error. It knows that “breath” and “breathe” are two different words, and it knows that one is a noun and the other a verb, but it does not know which of the two words should be used in a phrase with “easy.”

Shortly after receiving the email about easing my breath, I got another bit of advice about leaving packages and shopping bags in the car. It was suggested that I should keep such things “out of plain site.” This is even more difficult for Word to deal with because “sight” and “site” are both correctly-spelled nouns, but the difference in their meanings is significant.

I don’t think the English language is being destroyed as some die-hard grammarians might insist. However, I do think it is being severely beaten by people who either did not get a good education (because of a poor school system, because of an incompetent teacher, or because of personal inabilities or laziness) and who do not now care enough to take the extra time to make sure their writing is correct.

But until I figure out what to do about this problem, I’ll be sure to keep my purchases out of plain location after I go shopping.