Spell check

humour

All this while, I had thought ‘ministership’ was a word in the dictionary until I saw it underlined in red in a Microsoft Word document.

When I moved the mouse over the underlined ‘ministership’ and ‘right-clicked’, I burst into laughter seeing one of the recommended spelling corrections — minister’s hip.

For proper nouns, such suggestions turn out to be even more amusing. While the Word editor’s suggestion for ‘Srinath’ includes the likes of ‘spinach’ and ‘strength’, it mentions ‘soda’, ‘Sudan’ and ‘such’ as a suitable replacement for ‘Sudha’. It now appears that I have many options to choose from, and I could opt to become either Soda Spinach or Such Strength or Sudan Strength, for that matter.

When I told my little daughter about the choices I have and the dilemma I was in, she jokingly replied, “Since we don’t use much soda at home, you shouldn’t opt for that choice.

Unfortunately, you can choose only one among ‘spinach’ and ‘strength’, even though you like both those words. ‘Such Spinach’ sounds ridiculous. So, you should settle for ‘Such Strength’, Amma! By the way, I prefer to call you ‘Amma’ even though I am given choices like ‘Ammo’, ‘Emma’ and ‘Amax’.

While the spelling suggestion for ‘Sindhu’ as ‘Hindu’ and ‘Mysore’ as ‘my sore’ seem very logical, it is very vague to see how ‘vague’ is chosen for ‘Vasudev’ and ‘Headband’ for ‘Ahmedabad’. Our dear editor can change ‘Usha’ to ‘usher’, ‘Lakshmi’ to ‘Kashmir’, ‘Sumathi’ to ‘sympathy’, ‘Rachana’ to ‘reaching’, ‘Rashmi’ to ‘resume’, ‘Karthik’ to ‘Kathy’, ‘Vivek’ to ‘vivid’ and so on.

Ashwini is given an option to become ‘shiny’ whereas Ashwin has to go for ‘ashbin’!
The editor intelligently makes a suggestion to correct ‘shiva’ as ‘Shiva’. However, ‘shiver’ and ‘shave’ are two other suggestions. “If Lord Shiva shaved his matted hair, he would shiver because of Ganga flowing all over. It is a clever editor Amma,” my daughter quipped.

Suresh teases his wife Suruchi that he married her because the Word editor suggested ‘Suresh’ as spelling correction for ‘Suruchi’! He also teases her that she should work for ‘Suzuki’ from ‘Zurich’. She scares him by saying that then there would be no ‘surety’ that she would be his wife.

At times, the editor does give up and doesn’t cough up any spelling suggestions as in the case of ‘Kodandaram’; it made my dad very happy that his name was not distorted. We should be thankful that it adds a little laughter to relieve one of everyday stress.

If you are feeling low or if you want to have a good laugh, just open a Microsoft Word document and type your name or some names from among your family and friends and check out all the hilarious suggestions. Have fun!