Don't Spell My Checks!

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 does not a clever person make. I am becoming a lazy-ass typer. In the past couple of years, my typing speed has really improved and I can touch-type (not by the strictly technical sense of the term) a lot more than I used to. Sort of. Anyway, consequently my accuracy was also getting better. That is, until Outlook 2007 came along. At work, they recently switched us over to all Office 2007 products. In all honesty, I rather like the 2007 batch. There are lots of little handy buttons and the layout isn’t too bad. I quite like the 2007 version of Outlook. But one thing I’m not sure about is the spell-check function. Correction. The automatic spell-check function. If I type a word wrongly, say I transpose a couple of letters, it automatically corrects it as I type. That's good, you may say. Yes, I suppose it is, from a professional point of view, although spelling isn't usually one of my weak points. Not such a good thing from the point of view of improving my typing accuracy. Nor is it good from another point of view...

I quite often compose draft blog posts in Outlook as email messages, which I either send to myself or just copy and paste into Blogger, because it is more discreet than having the Blogger website open in my browser. Lolly and I have a running joke about every single email we send to each other from work taking an extra 2 minutes to send, while spell-check flags up all our made-up words and phrases, or continentalised (<-- see?) versions of words. It used to give me a chuckle seeing just how many words in our emails would be underscored with the tell-tale squiggly red line. But now, Outlook 2007, you have taken it too far. In an email I just sent, it automatically changed hystericle to hysterical. I meant to spell it the first way! Maybe I should have actually typed it properly: hystericlé. Oh my goodness, even that didn’t work, it just tried to change it again, even with the accent! Lolly and I routinely change the suffix of words by adding an accent to either change the pronunciation or add an extra syllable (or syllablé, lol, which it also just tried to change). [A classic example is Lisacles. No, it doesn’t rhyme with icicles. It is pronounced Lisacleese, OK?]

You’ve crossed a line, spell-check! I don’t mind you underlining our made-up (or inventificated) words in red, but don’t change them without my permission, dammit! I’m being creative here! Damn the man and his stifling ways!