The correction can prove to be quite humorous to the recipient if this comes in an email. For instance, my friend Alva and I often sign off an email with the phrase, love, hugs and prayers. One day, Alva was in a hurry and ended her email with Love, bugs and prayers. Well, bugs is an actual word and so wasn’t corrected by spell check but I sure smiled when I heard the new phrase with my audible computer program.
Some years ago I tried out a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking. Basically the user spoke the message and didn’t touch the keyboard. Because I hadn’t really thought out what I might want to say, my message began with a long drawn out, “Aaaaarrrhh....” When I replayed the words, that is precisely what I heard.
Anyway, the funniest of all messages came to me last week in the subject line of an email. My friend is for all practical purposes without sight and also uses a program where she speaks and the computer types the message. Sue and I are good friends and so I was quite surprised to see her subject line, “You’re So Useless.”
Did Sue really think that I was useless? In the text, there wasn’t any indication that Sue actually thought this. I finally figured out what had happened. Sue lives in Osoyoos in British Columbia. The pronunciation of the town is often given as Os-oo-yoos with an emphasis on the second syllable. Yes, I can see that a spell check program might translate this to be, You’re So Useless. Definitely a case of spell check L O L.
P.S. This note is for sighted readers. The spacing between the letters L O L is intentional so that the abbreviation can be read by audible computer programs with letter separation and not as a single word.
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