Microsoft Word doesn’t know the subjunctive mood? The spell check function wants to change “God bless you” to “God blesses you” and “Praise be unto you” to “Praise is unto you.” I’m surprised that Microsoft overlooked these forms.
Well, how do you think it could tell? It’s just coded to offer a correction when it sees a singular subject followed by a verb without an “s”.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
A germane question, I think, is how can you tell?
MS Word is a liar and a cheat!
ok, less the cheat than the liar
It’s all those godless heathens at Microsoft.
Well, those are both fairly archaic constructions only surviving by virtue of having become fixed phrases. Might as well complain if Microsoft Word green-lines “The wages of sin is death”.
Granted, it would of course be better if the software recognized those fixed phrases, but, well, it’s of so little use already that that’s among the least of one’s worries in improving it.
I’m not sure what the term is for another “archaic” construction, but my MS Word accepts “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” as grammatical. Hmmm.
Well, it’s really, really flaky. I just opened mine up and it accepts “I am they jump the cat” as grammatical, for example [yes, I checked to make sure it at least rejects some other examples]. Actually, I still have difficulty believing that…
Some of it depends on your settings, really. Go to Tools, Options and open the Spelling and Grammar tab. In the grammar section, click Settings. It gives you a boatload of options to check for.
I’ve turned off most of the grammar checking because I trust my knowledge more than I trust a blind program. Microsoft didn’t set out to create the very best grammar checker in the world, so I don’t expect much of their grammar checker.