Are the spelling check people reasonable?

The spell check program here is flawed. It has told me my spelling was wrong more than once and the program has been wrong in every case. I have the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary (full version), and Roget's Thesaurus at my elbow. and when I am uncertain, I check.

Personally, I like it when spelling is correct. If I'm reading something, and a word is spelled wrong, it's very distracting. While grading a physics lab I even took off a point for spelling once (the person still got the highest grade in the class). However, this does not mean I'm free from spelling errors. Typically my errors consist of leaving out whole words, but occasionally I'll type one word when I mean another. I think it's obnoxious when I do it, too, so I'll go back later and fix it if I notice it.

Spell checkers are somewhat stupid, though. They typically don't catch substitution of one word for another, and they also don't seem to know about spelling variants. The ones that Yahoo and Microsoft use usually reject double letters for the -ing form, even though that was standard spelling until recently. I prefer to write about climate modelling than climate modeling. In fact, I used to work at a company where it was REQUIRED to spell modelling with two l's.

Also, some spell checkers will tell you that queueing is wrong (like the one in YA), and that it should be queuing, but when you spell it the second way the word loses its status of having the most consecutive vowels of any English word.

I highly recommend the poem "Owed to a spell checker." It shows the dangers of relying too much on a spell checker.

http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/people/faculty/te...

I certainly notice a lot of mistakes but I sometimes go back and reread what I wrote and uhh, well it wasn't pretty. I wouldn't be surprised if I stuck a few witches in there. I remember laughing at someone's socks one time, witch [sic] happened to be the day I put on something from the sock drawer that must have resembled socks when I woke up and everyone had a good laugh at whatever it was on my feet. I learned my lesson.

Call me a Category Nazi, but I noticed this question is under global warming. They may be spouting a lot of hot air, but I don't think that they contribute enough to global warming to warrant this question being in that category. That said, what you're talking about are hypocrites. It's really sad though, with all the tools to help people, that they can be so "aware" of bad spelling and commit atrocities like the one you describe.

Yes, mostly...but, as another poster noted...spell-check apps do sometimes make mistakes..and take no account of alternate spellings. What particularly "gets" me are folks using its/It's and your/you're incorrectly. The way one writes really does reflect one's education and intelligence.

I don't really care how you spell it. As long as I can understand it.

Look at Peggy. She likes spelling correct even if the logic is wrong. Ha! Ha! That's greenies for you.