Real Men/Women of Genius #70

[This one’s not so much to do with running, as with writing about it, which is another pet peeve of yours, eh? Me writing about it all the time! 🙂
Grate dais ever body! And Happy All Hallows’ Eve!!]

Bud Light presents…

REAL MEN OF GENIUS

{Re-al men of geeeeeene-yuss}

Today we salute you, Mr. Entirely Too Hyped-Up Word-Processing Auto-Corrective-Programming Software Engineer.

{Mis-ter “you caaaaaaaaaaaaan’t make a miss-take with myyyyyy pro-grammmmm!”}

Spell-check isn’t good enough for you, is it. No. So you’ve been given some kind of Microsoft mandate for making the world safe for English and grammar, and now you are single-handedly going to GUARANTEE that NO ONE who uses your program upon the Planet Earth will EVER make ANOTHER mistake of language again–for at least as long as the sun keeps shining or until the Chinese take over.

{“Myyyyy pro-gramm-mming e-ven fix-es gram-mars and grand-pas!”}

Instead of waiting for spell-check, your word processor now auto-corrects every single word as soon as it’s keyboarded. Even if it’s the wrong word, your program now rightly corrects it so that, all right, it stays wrong.

{“Mar-a-thon-ing” beee-comes “Marat honing”; “LSD” is “ly-ser-gic a-cid di-e-thy-la-miiiiiiiide”!}

Such electronic engineering must be a godsend. Certainly most humans wouldn’t send it. If we even try to begin a sentence with an uncapitalized letter, your program won’t allow it. If e. e. cummings were still alive, your programming wouldn’t allow him either.

{“Reddddd flow-ers are red, and greeeeeeeeeeeeen leaves are green!”}

And the rest of us dweebs who’d like to format poetry, for example? We’re out of luck. Because with your picayune language golden rules oversimplification, our lines cannot end with a comma–the next line immediately wraps up to join it–and when we insert an ellipsis, your program sees “period” and auto-capitalizes the very next letter. We can’t make a new line-break without correct end punctuation and we can’t start a new paragraph where you don’t think one should go and gawd ferbid we should EVER wish to make up a new word, huh?

{NO thankkkkkk you for doo-ing our think-inggggg for ussssss!!}

So crack open an ice-cold Bud Light in your cubicle, O Unilateral Arbiter and Enforcer of The King’s English, because if Mark Twain had used your word processor instead of his typewriter [he was the first American author to use one, you know], Huckleberry Finn would NOT be able to speak in Southern dialect; and your very own children would never even once in their lives be able to type “e” before “i” regardless of “c” or despite sounding like “a” as in “nieghbor” or “wiegh.”

{Mis-ter Enn-tiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-re-ly Too Hyped-Up Word-Proc-es-sing Au-to-Cor-rec-tive-Pro-gram-ming Soft-ware Ennn-gi-neeeeeeer!}

Bud Light beer: we don’t care where they brew it; we just dig their commercials.

( O_O )

Yours troubly,
The Troubadour

Yankee Folly of the Day:
Now I’m trying to imagine how Chinese electronics might stifle English creativity.