Will Spellcheck Ruin English?

Don’t get me wrong– I’m a huge fan of Grammarly and Spellcheck, and without predictive typing I would not even attempt texting on the small screen. These are amazing and highly useful technologies.

To be sure, these technologies are used in producing the Friday Briefing and Norm’s Notes, but from time to time I worry about what they are doing to our language, especially Canadian English.

As you know, those rascally Americans spell a lot of things wrong– they leave out the ‘u’ in neighbour, for instance, and they actually spell catalogue as it sounds. Perfidious lot, I say. And they have programmed their robots to nibble away at Canadian spelling quirks and rob us of our freedom to spell things as they don’t sound. A very unneighbo(u)rly behavio(u)r, thru and thru.

All jesting aside, these helpful applications are perhaps a little too helpful. Let me explain.

First, they suggest changes that you really don’t want, and if you aren’t paying attention you will find yourself sending texts which say what you don’t mean to say. For example, if you intend to say that you will “now be attending”, but auto-correction changes that to “not be attending”, unless you are paying very close attention (which we mostly don’t do), you’ll send the exact opposite of what you want to be saying. Technology needs to get a little smarter, or a little dumber. Right now it’s just smart enough to be dangerous.

But the greater concern I have is the “vanilla-ization” of prose.

Great prose employs poetic devices, even though (tho?) linear, non-rhyming, and non-stressed. Martin Luther King comes to mind. Great prose, like great music and all true art, teases the rules and dances along the cliff-edge of chaos. That’s what attracts us to art, after all.

Grammar, spelling and writing technologies are rules-based. When you push your luck with the rules and become too poetic, the technology gets hissy, prissy, and antsy. It begins to nag you like a schoolmarm. Artificial intelligence wants you to behave and be predictable.

Unless you are pretty sure of yourself, you’re going to draw back and toe the line. And then you lose creativity and originality. And when you lose creativity and originality, you lose humanity.

Ultimately, if humans succumb entirely to the nagging of artificial intelligence, why would we bother to create at all? Why not just let technology do the heavy lifting? “Hey, Google! Write my next Friday Briefing!” “Yes, Norman, consider it done. By the way, because you don’t have a paid subscription, the Briefing will contain advertising. Would you like me to process your credit card at this time?”

When I finally do let a robot take over my creative writing, I’m going to name it Orwell. Because some robots are more equal than others.