Is spellcheck really your friend?

[mamculuna]

Great lines from student papers--although I've warned them about this, they still don't think critically about the changes MS Word suggests. And yet maybe spellcheck can think more than we guess:

"Gregor wakes in the mourning to find he's become a beetle"

"The narrator goes to a distract of shops in search of Zaabalawi"

Comments

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

You should see what happens when they dive into a dual-language dictionary for foreign language class!

I will admit that only having heard the title, I did write "Morning becomes Electra" on purpose on a high school test, once.

Also, in that second one if the narrator took a taxi, was he driven to distraction?

[anomster.livejournal.com]

"if the narrator took a taxi, was he driven to distraction?"

Hahaaaaa! CW, you just got yourself promoted to the next level in Pun Fu! @>)

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

I know what weird things I do myself with an FL dictionary, and teaching ESL has really been fun, but that's at least understandable. Sad to say, these are native speakers. Don't know about the taxi, but it's certainly driving me in that direction...

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

My mother is a retired French teacher, and her favourite example was the person who meant to write "I can" and wrote "je poubelle". (For non French-speakers, "poubelle" can mean "tin can" but more normally means "dustbin".)