Spell checker recognises Travolta not Travelator

Zara Rabinowicz Writes...

Having recently made the move to Vista (OK, a while ago, but I'm still figuring out the kinks) I was confounded by my spell check not having half the words I needed in its dictionary. Spell checking now consists of adding words to its poor benighted tech programme, such as 'Zara: a real word. Oh yeah, and Rabinowicz too.' Once these basic steps were over I was in for couple more surprises. Vocab I'd expect to be included, such as the aforementioned travelator wasn't, whilst Travolta was. I started to wonder, just what kind of person wrote up the spell check, and how did they decide what to include?

They clearly were up to date on their celebrity knowledge, but did this include modern day stars or just the classics? A couple of tests later and I had the results. There were no complaints for Jessica Alba or Tom Cruise (perhaps down to the fact that their names are commonly used and mean other things) and Drew Barrymore also came out fine. The spellchecker wasn't having it for Keira Knightley (both words) Mischa Barton, or even Travolta's other half Olivia Newton John though.

There seems to be nor rhyme or reason for these particular choices but they do add an element of amusement when reading through received files in autocheck mode. The checker also seems up to date on his electronic brands as Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Samsung and Panasonic posed no problems. I guess that could be expected from a programmer though, so I thought I'd try some other well known names from the beauty sphere. Would this define the sex of our mystery censor?

Oh yes, definitely a male, as Clarins, Decleor, Elizabeth Arden and UK based brand Rimmel all had that lovely red underline going on. I find this all fairly amusing, and a quick Google showed me that there are no beauty plug ins for your spell check, whilst there is a Sci Proof add on, which includes chemicals, mathematical formula data and other uncommon terminology to your dictionary.

So, no clue as to who programmed Word, or why they chose the words they did, but we can definitely ascertain they were male and probably play computer games (just guessing). Till the time that Spellcheck includes all known brands, celebrity names and obscure scientific terminology I guess we're just going to add things the old fashioned way - manually.

Zara Rabinowicz writes for Shiny Shiny, Star Trip, The Baglady and Kiss and Makeup and is guilty of spelling mistakes.