Raymond Chen writes about a man whose work affected us all:
I recently learned of the passing of someone whose work nearly everybody knows, but nobody knows his name. Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported the game Chip’s Challenge to Windows for the Windows Entertainment Pack.¹ But that’s probably not the code he wrote that touched the most people. Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that. He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.”
In early versions of Word, the Spell Check feature was something that you explicitly invoked, and then you had to sit and wait while the program looked for all your potentially-misspelled words, and then showed them to you one at a time for a decision on what to do for each one. Word did introduce an Auto Spell Check feature to run spell check when the user was idle, so that when you hit the Spell Check button, the results were ready to go. However, the Auto Spell Check was still a blocking operation. As a result, a lot of users turned it off because it always seemed to decide “Now would be a good time to spell-check the document” just as you wanted to do something, forcing you to wait for the spell check pass to complete before you could, say, save and exit.
Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors). […]
Today, there are red (and even green and blue) squiggles in nearly every word processor, and often outside word processors. Tony did it first. The next time a red squiggle catches one of your mistakes, say thanks to Tony. I think he’d appreciate it.
Thanks, Tony! I know a lot of people hate those squiggles, but I love them (and so, according to the linked post, did Penn and Teller). As a copy editor (ret’d), I appreciate anything that helps people keep their writing free of unintended errors. And I deliberately misspelled the post title so I could bask in the red squiggle it provokes.
It is especially the green squiggly lines that are not loved, for they suggest that passive voice should not be employed. In memmoriam.
But seriously, I turn the red squiggly lines off because I have strong antiprescriptivist feelings about spelling variants and refuse to be consistently Microsoft-American.
By the way, the word antiprescriptivist produced a red squiggly line on my browser. But I kept it.
I heard a story, true or otherwise, about a hapless typist in the early days, over-relying on the spellcheck, who began a letter with “Dead Sir, …”
I love it!
Sadly, the current version has been crappified. It will flag a word that is spelled correctly, but which is less common than some similar word. So “waive” will be flagged in case I meant “wave.” I work in a law firm. I meant “waive,” thank you very much.
In the meantime the grammar side has devolved from merely flagging perfectly cromulent uses of the passive voice into suggesting miscorrections of correctly written passages that would produce pure gibberish, were the suggestions accepted.
I suspect both the spelling and grammar sides have been turned over to LLMs, with some half-assed probabilistic analysis compared with the training data.
That’s an improvement over the spell checkers on phones that have caused the extinction of a while outside of edited prose. It’s all awhile now, a word that used to be very rare and a synonym of the adverb-or-whatever while.
This is the general kind of thing I see in my page proofs that were copyedited by the publisher’s own Artificial Idiocy that they’re so proud of.
Sadly, the current version has been crappified. […] I suspect both the spelling and grammar sides have been turned over to LLMs, with some half-assed probabilistic analysis compared with the training data.
Yup, and I’m guessing Tony wouldn’t be happy about it. But his idea was a good one; I still remember these days:
When I was copyediting for Evil Ad Agency, they dragged us into dark rooms and had us spend what felt like hours going over copy that way, making a decision about every goddam word. What a waste!
I thought the rare-word underline was a different colour from the non-word one? I know you can add a personal dictionary of non-non-words; can you also add one for non-rare-words?
It mostly goes in random directions now, and you have to guess really hard what the person typing means to convey as meaning in places like youtube comments. I think I understand maybe half the comments on youtube in the last ten years. And I basically only watch UK and US late night shows on TV.
And the Bulgarian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
When I was student, I used a version of Word that used purple, I think it was, squiggles to indicate words it thought were excessively formal. Of course, in those ante-AI days the software had no way to judge the formality level of text, and regularly supplied incongruously colloquial suggestions for improvements in formal texts.