Funniest spellchecker missfires?

…Elly?

Old-school Catholics will appreciate this, others may not.

Years ago, it was traditional for people to go to church on February 2nd, and have their throats blessed. You see, February 2nd was the feast day of St. Blaise, patron saint of people with throat diseases.

Blaise has always been a fairly common name in France, but it’s rare in English, so most spell check software in the U.S. doesn’t accept it as a real word.

That’s why, last January, when I was reading my church bulletin, I saw a paragraph telling people to come to church on February 2nd in honor of “St. Blase.” (There must be a way I could get the accent over the e!)

When I read that, I figured St. Blase must be the patron of people who are apathetic about throat disease.

Alt 130

Thanks Parrothead, it sure was Word 3.0! I remember doing a doubletake so fast my eyeballs had to catch up!

I was just editing a software installation document, where several instances of ‘implement’ were instead spelled ‘IMPALEMENT’ …

Unfortunately, none were all that funny in context, but I did get a snerk out of it anyway.

(Excuse me, I’ve gotta go impale Word XP… I WISH!)

Ooooh, I remembered another—when I was at Art Direction magazine about ten years back, I interviewed an artist who used “watercolor and gouache” in her work, which came very close to being printed as “watercolor and douche.”

Band name!

I once typeset a newsletter containing Jimi Hendrix’s name, and the spellcheck suggested “Hendrix” be changed to “Negroes”.