words are images

Ok, it’s been so long since I posted anything that I forgot my username and password. Of course, I wrote them down, but it didn’t help that I had written the wrong username. Oh well.

Anyhow, on to spellcheck. I love spellcheck, but not for the reason that you might think. I’m pretty good at spelling and spellchecking is generally more useful to me for catching typos. But a lot (notice that ‘alot’ is not a word) of words that I use in technical documents are not in MS Word’s dictionary, so it will make suggestions. Sometimes these are hilarious.

Today I was updating my resume and I wanted to include my experience with WordPress, the blogging software I use to write this stuff. Well, my edition of Word was born before blogging, because spellcheck didn’t recognize the word. Here is what Word suggested for ‘blogging’:

bogging
logging
slogging
clogging
flogging

Hmmm. Maybe spellcheck is smarter than I thought…

Many people have complained that America is being “dumbed down” - entertainment, literature, politics are all directed at the lowest common denominator. I don’t think that’s true everywhere, though. In the physical world, we have conservation of momentum, conservation of energy. In the ‘real’ world, there must be conservation of dumbness; if we get dumbed down in one area, we’re getting dumbed up in another.

So where is the dumbing up happening? I’ll give you a hint: look at your bills or your bank statement. The accounting and financial management professions are leading the way. If there’s a way to make a transaction so complex that people won’t understand that they’re being shafted, these people will do it. Think Enron.

Of course, (more…)