Microsoft Gone Wrong

June 8th, 2008

Matt, the submitter of this photo, writes, “this is a great (albeit scary) example of what happens when the grammar checker in Microsoft Word doesn’t take context into consideration. I was working on my Physics project when this gem popped up; unfortunately, it made me laugh and cringe at the same time. The suggestion doesn’t even make sense, either.”

Redneck Fail
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Parking Fail
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Coffee FAIL
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8 Responses to Microsoft Gone Wrong

  1. fail on June 8th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    english-fail fail: what is omitted at the position of the apostrohpe?

  2. tracy on June 8th, 2008 at 4:13 pm

    comment fail: i couldn’t resist pointing out that “apostrophe” is spelled wrong.

  3. Tal on June 8th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    It’s meant to be possessive- the hearing belonging to one non-specific, hypothetical person.

  4. deMute on June 8th, 2008 at 5:44 pm

    Just three things with nothing to do with grammar really:
    1) The usually quoted range of human hearing is 20Hz – 20kHz
    2) Middle C (C4) is ~262Hz which is well below 1kHz. 1 to 4kHz is approximately in the same range as C6 to C8 which is two to four octaves higher than Middle C.
    3) You probably want to say ‘sensitivity of one’s hearing’ since ‘power’ in physics is usually used to mean watts or joules per second.

    That’s my two cents/pence, wha’eva ;)

  5. R on June 9th, 2008 at 6:30 am

    It looks like grammar check failed because the user failed and put a space between the apostrophe and the S. :P

  6. Rob on June 12th, 2008 at 9:59 am

    SI prefix fail: kHz should have a lower-case k, not a capital.

  7. Mal on June 13th, 2008 at 3:37 pm

    Tal is right, the user did not fail, the grammar is correct. (“One does not wish to overstay one’s welcome,” for example.)

    The checker obviously thought the writer meant “one is” so it helpfully responded with a suggestion to change it to “one are.”

    Yes. This is why I force my students to spellcheck their papers but do not allow them to use grammar check.

  8. David on June 13th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

    Quote from Rob:
    –”SI prefix fail: kHz should have a lower-case k, not a capital.”

    Thank you! I’m glad that there’s someone else in this world who notices things like this.

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