Microsoft Gone Wrong
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.”
Facebook
english-fail fail: what is omitted at the position of the apostrohpe?
comment fail: i couldn’t resist pointing out that “apostrophe” is spelled wrong.
It’s meant to be possessive- the hearing belonging to one non-specific, hypothetical person.
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
It looks like grammar check failed because the user failed and put a space between the apostrophe and the S.
SI prefix fail: kHz should have a lower-case k, not a capital.
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.
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.