O NE OF the many infuriating things about a computer crash is the loss of the custom dictionary in the word processor.
Of course, one should always assume the computer will crash with loss of all data any day and be religious about doing back-ups of everything. Alas, I am not especially religious. Nearly everything has been saved, but not that custom dictionary. It means adding to the dictionary hundreds of unusual proper nouns, like Warrnambool with two Rs and Waramanga with one, so they do not appear as mistakes, and when you do make a mistake like Warnambool you know it actually is one and must be corrected. I could decide not to worry about adding such words to the dictionary, but then you have to check every subsequent time you use them, as the ravages of age befuddle the brain. Anyway, the proper nouns are not so bad. Worse, is the fact that many British spellings are thrown up as spelling errors. Again, they have to be added to the dictionary.
Again, so a real mistake is recorded as error such as sucour and does not squeak through uncorrected as just another British spelling being denounced by Microsoft’s spell-checker. It is perhaps fortuitous that the crash came in the same week as I have been marking some student assignments and the same week as the retirement (for the second time this time at age 80 after working nearly 20 years part-time) of a former chief sub-editor of The Canberra Times, Michael Travis. He was a stickler for not only getting spelling right, but in sound English usage in general. He would applaud the use of ”fortuitous” in the previous paragraph because I meant accidental and undesigned, not fortunate.
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