22 Reasons Not To Trust Spell-Check

You probably know that if you accidentally type, say, aobut or Febuary in a Word document, squiggly little red underlining will alert you to your mistake. Then you just select the offending word and right-click for a list of suggestions.

And look, the top of the list is the very word you meant to type—just click and it's fixed! The convenience of not having to figure out how to look up a word you can't spell far outweighs the offense you may take at Word suggesting that your last name is a misspelling.

But before you thank Bill Gates for saving your writing career, you might want to take a look at the following list. Spell check will scream if you use a spelling that isn't in the dictionary, but for the most part it won't even whimper if you spell the wrong word correctly.

1. bail gets you out of jail; a bale holds hay.

2. breath is a noun; breathe is a verb (She will breathe her last breath.)

3. To clench is to hold tightly (The Senator clenched his jaw and then shouted, "Richards, you're a liar!"); to clinch is to make a certainty (This ill-timed remark clinched the election for Richards)

4. coral is a sessile aquatic animal; corral is a horse enclosure.

5. farther is for measurable distances or times; further is for something you can only measure by degree: The farther he got into his teen years, the further his acne progressed.

6. gilding is a metallurgical process; a gelding is a colt.

7. it's means it is or it has. The possessive of it is its. (It's a curious thing, the apostrophe, with all its many misuses.)

8. lay is transitive; lie is intransitive.*

9. lead is present tense; led is past.

10. Only capitalize mother and daddy at the beginning of a sentence or when used in place of a proper name—never after a possessive pronoun.

11. Philly is a nickname for Philadelphia; filly is a young mare. The plural is fillies (and refer to a filly as it or her, not him).

12. raise is transitive; rise is not. (I cannot rise in society unless I raise my income.)

13. reins are for horses; reigns are for kings.

14. riding—the progressive of "ride." The progressive of "rid" is ridding.

15. road—an asphalt surface. The past tense of "ride" is rode.

16. sat is for people; set is for objects. (Example: He set down his knapsack and sat in the chair.)

17. suppose (I suppose I should do that) is easily confused with supposed (I was supposed to do that).

18. there is a place; the possessive of they is their; they're means they are. (They're trying to get their junk out of there.)

19. To change one's mind is to waver; a special exemption is a waiver.

20. Web site is two words, and the W is capitalized (short for the proper noun World Wide Web).

21. wonder is a transitive verb; wander is not. (I wonder why my mind tends to wander.)

22. you're means you are. The possessive of you is your. (You're going to have to remember that your possessive pronouns never, ever, ever use apostrophes.)

*These two buggers are so tricky I thought we needed a little chart:

Present Tense: I lie on the couch and lay my hat on the table.

Past Tense: I lay on the couch and laid my hat on the table.

(Hint: Think of laid an egg.)

Past Perfect Tense: I had lain on the couch and laid my hat on the table.

(Hint: The in in lain stands for intransitive!)

Okay, here's a little test. Replace each (?) with the appropriate word from the following list.

I know (?) no way that Porsche could be (?).

1. their's
2. theirs
3. there's
4. theres
5. they're's
6. they'res

The word that rhymes with scares wasn't in the list, I know. But if you were paying attention, you should be able to figure it out. Find the answer in my next post.