I’m sorry but I tried to edit the above post and missed the 5 minute deadline (or however long we are given).
There was no need to talk about some other board or other editor. The problem was evident with this editor on this board. So, please just ignore the above post if possible. I will now post an abbreviated form which states the problem as it applies to this board alone.
The spell checker on this board rejected my spelling of the following word: “strategize”.
I used it in both of the following forms … Joe could not out strategize Jack. awa … Joe could not out-strategize Jack. Both forms were rejected. (the second form was hyphenated).
Can anyone suggest to me a reason why this spell-checker might have rejected the spelling of “strategize”?
It also rejects “strategise” which I tried because sometimes it does reject words with a “z” although it will accept that word using an “s” instead of the “z”.
Even my English English spell checker accepts strategize, although it looks very ugly to my eyes and is not a word I would use. Outmanoeuvre would be better.
The spellchecker for text boxes is not (normally anyway, probably never) associated with the site or web page you are using, rather it is built into your browser.In my case, I am using Firefox, and it (with the default American English “dictionary” I guess) does indeed flag “strategize” as misspelled. I have had it flag other correctly spelled words as incorrect, and it probably lets some correctly spelled words slip past as well. The lesson is, spellcheckers are not perfect (and are never going to be). They do not have every word in the language in their “dictionaries”, and some of the words they do have will undoubtedly be wrong. Don’t put too much reliance on them.
I recommend OneLook Dictionary Search as a useful backup. It searches and gives results from, multiple free online dictionaries.
You may be able to download an alternative spellcheck “dictionary” as a Firefox extension (maybe for other browsers too), but it will still occasionally get things wrong. (Interestingly, I see Firefox accepts “spellcheckers” as correct, but rejects “spellcheck” as a misspelling. Oh well!)
They don’t mean the same thing. Strategy is a plan, Manoeuvre is an action. (My Firefox spellcheck rejects “Manoeuvre”, and offers no corresponding alternatives, but accepts “maneuver”).
Well, yes, they don’t mean quite the same thing, but to strategize is an action, a mental action: to devise a plan. However, by the look of Charlie Wayne’s example, he most likely really means outmanoeuvre.
Yes, mine too, and it also rejects “outmanoeuvre”. OneLook confirms both are correct.
With spellcheckers, one is really at the mercy of whoever originally typed the words into some database. IIRC, the spellchecker for my old BBC Micro, which came on a ROM chip, accepted “nnnnnn” (or some similar number of ns) as a word.
There are three words, all different, that need to be distinguished. Maneuver is the single movement of a single element, which may be a part of a system of tactics. Tactics are the physical events, taken in concert to achieve a desired objective. Strategy is the planning of the tactics and the visualization of the desired result.
Consider a baseball analogy. The manager in the dugout has a strategy – to place a runner in scoring position. He elects to direct his players to use a tactic of the sacrifice bunt. This requires several maneuvers, including the batter holding the bat in such a way that the pitch bounces lightly off the bat, but other players must also execute maneuvers for the tactic to be successful and validate the chosen strategy…
“Strategize” is a relatively recent word and falls into that category of words that are so obviously back-formed from older words (here: “strategy”) that some choose to say they don’t count as real words. I’m not surprised that you’ve found a word list that leaves it out.
Keep in mind that even though you saw the effect on multiple sites you were almost certainly only seeing the results of one spellchecker, the one in your browser.
“A maneuver” (noun) may, in some sense,* normally refer to a single movement, but the verb “to maneuver” normally suggests a whole sequence of coordinated movements (pre-planned or otherwise) aimed at some goal or final state. It was this verbal sense of “maneuver” that was being discussed (in semantic comparison to the verb to strategize), so your remarks about the noun sense are not not really relevant. Nor are your remarks about the difference between strategy and tactics much to the point, particularly as, so far as I am aware, there is no commonly used verb deriving from “tactic”.
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*I say “in some sense” because counting movements is not a straightforward matter. Most things we call movements are made up of many sub-movements, which themselves may often be compound.
It goes back to 1921 according to Merriam-Webster. Is that too new to count as a “real” word? And English is full of venerable back-formations. Surely there are many younger but perfectly respectable words. What about poor “laser”, which not only goes back no further than 1957, but suffers the ignominy of being formed from an acronym! It seems like a real word to me, and Firefox sure ain’t complaining.
You’re preaching to the choir, man. Wordifying acronyms is swallowed more readily by prescriptivists than verbifying nouns.
Which is why my browser’s spellchecker is yelling at me for “verbifying”, even thought that one goes back to 1913. First-use date is often very different from generally-recognized-as-a-“valid”-word date. The latter sometimes never even comes.