Spellchecker firm corrects typo

Well, I'm sorry but isn't that just the loveliest headline you've ever seen? It is for me at any rate, I'm a grammar nazi of the highest degree and get really upset when apostrophes go walkabouts and the like. Although, I've become less of a twat about it recently. This is mostly because my brain and my fingers don't seem to want to type in harmony and I've started getting my they're there and theirs in the wrong order, which is the GN equivalent of starting a holy war.

Anyway, this headline comes from a PR company handling a firm who make software to eliminate spelling mistakes on the web. You can pretty much guess it from here, can't you? The PR company had to re-release their own press release after mis-spelling one of the words in it. To be fair, they didn't really mis-spell anything, they just left a letter off the end. You're typing in a hurry, it can happen to anyone, but that wouldn't make grammar nazis laugh so much.

La BBC says: 'Canadian company TextTrust, which sells software to eliminate "the negative text impressions on Web sites", had to send out its own statement again.

The release listed "the 16 million we (sic) pages it has spellchecked over the past year".

...

"I made the mistake, not TextTrust - they do a much better job," said PR manager Pat Brink. "It's certainly egg on the face of this public relations person." '

I don't really remember why I'm so picky about grammar. When did it start, this absolute compulsion to have everything done properly? I certainly don't give a rat's ass about using whom, mostly because even I haven't swallowed that many plums, but spelling, puncutation and grammar are so important for me. It's like respecting the person I'm writing to, I suppose. I could always just be polite, but that requires far too much effort.

Text speak gave me the ebgbs on an epic scale. Writing in full sentences didn't mean SMSs would be huge sprawling things unless I became Lady Terse of Curmudgeonland, predictive text is not hard, people. Although, my folks have never got the hang of it, so I get text speak from them. Bless. How modern they are.

I used to be a lot more militant about spelling than I am now, but I used to be a lot more inflexible as well. I no longer worry (as much) that random people who talk to me on trains are planning to abduct me and I no longer need a rigid two guitar, bass, drums line-up to make my ears happy. I still fucking hate James Blunt though - but he's very funny in interviews. That's as far as I'm going on that point.