What's wrong with trusting spellcheck, anyways?

My grasp of the English language has been a hard-fought battle as my primary/secondary education was sadly deficient when it came to grammar, syntax and spelling. Like many students of my vintage, I learned the parts of speech in French class instead of English class and then only insofar as it pertained to what I was clumsily translating.

I have exasperating memories of being told to look-up spellings I didn't know in a dictionary. As you most likely know, dictionaries are in alphabetical order, thereby requiring you to know the order of the letters in the word, or how to spell it, before it can be looked up. Needless to say this catch 22 of advice did not inspire the little speller within me. In fact, though I have since learned how to spell “definitely” correctly on the first try and how not to leave my participles precariously dangling, my aptitude in grammar and spelling is still just intermediate at best. These skills tend to be even less advanced at 6 o'clock in the morning when I am still writing a paper, which is invariably due later that day.

I owe a lot of my academic success to writer's handbooks and my computer — or more correctly, the software my computer houses. MSWord's “Grammar Wizard” taught me the proper uses of the semi colon; a task that my Dad attempted, and failed, repeatedly. Having sentence fragments, disagreement in tenses, spacing errors and the like gently pointed out by an unobtrusive green line is invaluable. Typos and common mistakes disappearing as quickly as one can type them is a truly amazing feat.

There is no arguing that spell/grammar-check programs can pick up the slack for an education lacking in basic language skills. But who checks spell-check?

Foolish are those who blindly trust spell-check programs as they will be damned to an eternity of American spellings and misspelled words being carelessly replaced with ones which, although spelled correctly, make (maple) no (in) sense (sepses) contextually. But this is not what is meant by the above question. Rather, I am referring to a recent discovery, which I feel is telling of a grim future where all grammatical rules and regulations will be thrown out the window, where regional dialects will run amok, where the deregulation of language will cause a rift in communication and therefore society as we know it. The acceptance of the pseudo-word “anyways” in the spell-check dictionary of MSWord could mark the beginning of the end for us all.

At first I thought “anyways” was something I just had to tolerate in the speech patterns of youth and other unconcerned individuals; akin to the encroaching extinction of the adverb in verbal communication and the valley-girlesque misuse of inflection. Then one day, while running the spell-check feature on a blog entry wherein I complained about people who said “anyways,” my spelling was not drawn into question. I was shocked and confused and thus my search began.

Like any good quest, mine started with self-doubt. Could it be that “anyways” really was a word? Had I been wrong all of these years?

My first inclination was to check every one of my five hardcopy dictionaries, none of which had anything regarding the pluralization of “anyway,” not even as slang or informal. I did, however, discover that “anyway” is an adverb, as it modifies an entire sentence. An interesting tidbit of information, especially considering the fact that adverbs cannot be pluralized. We don't “quicklys” run places. The girl did not open her birthday presents “happillies”. And things cannot happen “anyways”.

I was satisfied at that point that “anyways” was at least not proper English, but why then would a spellchecker accept it as a correct spelling? I decided that it would be best to check an Internet resource as the problem had originated there. Dictionary.com did turn up a definition for “anyways,” stating that it was a nonstandard version of “anyway.” Nonstandard, indeed!

So then I got to thinking, maybe LiveJournal.com accepts “anyways” because it is a part of an informal dialect like “ain't” or “wanna.” Sure enough, after typing the sentence “I ain't wanna go there anyways” into my blog, I ran the spellchecker and my horrific sentence might as well have been written in the Queen's English for all the errors it found.

Though my hypothesis was proved correct, it did not mean I was happy about it and grew more curious. If the Internet was growing to accept informal language as “correct,” was all technology doing so? Warily, I opened MSWord and typed the same “sentence”: “I ain't wanna go there anyways,” only to have screaming red lines appear under the words “ain't” and “wanna” but not “anyways.” My heart was broken. The program I had trusted for years to show me the way of the letters was betraying me, clear as day, in black and white…and red. I am still hurt and confused by the whole ordeal.

With all the time people are spending on the Internet today, and the dependency so many of us have on technology when it comes to our writing skills, the thought that these things are promoting incorrect English is terrifying. Obviously language evolves and changes, if it weren't for evolution in language, English would not exist at all. However, this does not give license to throw away standardizations, as without them eventually I would have as much chance of understanding someone from Toronto as I do now of understanding someone from Zanzibar.

The slow leak of popular bastardizations of language into spellchecking programs spells nothing but trouble. As it is unlikely that I will be able to convince the people at Microsoft to revise their “anyways” policy it is up to individuals like you and me to resist the War on English.

So please, I urge you, resist the temptations of nonstandard adverbs, American spellings and unfortunate dialects, and vote “yes” on “Preposition To.”

Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.