… for making superscripted ordinals the default setting in Microsoft Word? I see those stupid things everywhere now (in Arial, of course, the ugly duckling of the typographic world which will never, ever be a swan). When I was copy editing full-time I had to de-superscript those ths and sts and nds and rds constantly, undoing the damage caused by that stupid “feature.” If I ever find the programmer responsible – no, scratch that, it had to be a necktie-wearing critter of some kind – I will wring his pencil neck.
There’s only one person in charge at Microsoft. And yes, he is a pencil-necked geek.
Don’t just complain. Turn the feature off.
Click on “tools” then “Autocorrect.” Click on the “Autoformat as you type” tab. There’s a check box “Ordinals with Superscript.” Turn that off and say “OK.”
It takes about 15 seconds.
Duh. I know how to turn it off. The problem is, 99 percent of humanity doesn’t know how to turn it off, doesn’t know it can be turned off, doesn’t know it should be turned off, doesn’t even think about it at all. Most folks just go with the stupid, pointless, out-of-left-field flow.
Shut up, all of you. Superscripted ordinals ROCK. Now if I could only get it to do that for nominal abbreviations like “Wm.” and “Danl.” and “Bros.” I could get all 18th-century on your asses. 