5 ms·
Microsoft is rolling out ‘inclusiveness’ checker in Word
- Zababa 5y agoThat's a great way to be up to date with how to talk for people a bit out of the loop. My hope is that this will end up as a "no one can be fired for following Microsoft Word suggestions". I've always struggled to find an up-to-date authoritative source about changes in the way we're supposed to speak in the last ~20 years.
- faisal_ksa 5y agoIt's not a big deal. If you don't like it, don't use it. However, some of the examples in the article is funny.
- type0 5y agoThat's right, I don't use it (by it I mean MS Word)
- 4gotunameagain 5y agoA feature present on the most popular text editor which modifies text based on political beliefs is not a big deal? Really?
- nicbou 5y agoI heard many bad things about tabloid press, but that's the first time I actually see The Sun. The tone is very grating.
- qsort 5y agoYeah, I don't know what's more cringeworthy, that Microsoft is rolling out this idiotic unfeature or that someone greenlighted this embarassment of an article. I feel old.
- mildmotive 5y agoI don’t want management in Microsoft making ideological ”corrections” to what I write. That’s simply unacceptable. Thank God we have open source alternatives like LibreOffice. This feature seems to be opt-in, but in the future it might get enabled by default.
- hilbert42 5y ago"This feature seems to be opt-in, but in the future it might get enabled by default." And you can bet that whenever you use one of those phrases or reject Microsoft's recommended alternatives then your stats will be collected and sent to MS. Being in the possession of the collective data of millions of users puts MS in a position of being able to determine the mood of the populous on many social issues, thus it's in a position of being able to wield real political power. Leak what people are thinking to politicians etc. and you'll have the potential to alter politics. The other way of viewing this is that if enough people adopt or use Microsoft's recommended phraseology then, in effect, society will have adopted a form of subliminal social engineering - for eventually that will become the dominant 'speak'. The question of course is who gets to set what's acceptable and what is not. Why has Microsoft now become the arbiter of our social norms? And what on whose right or authority has Microsoft accepted such aagency? Right, it's none other than itself. As is is, in recent decades we've already been forced to moderate what we say or write to a point where we now cannot express ourselves openly. This alone is dangerous and ultimately it'll have political consequences. Moreover, if we can't speak out without fear then we've not only lost our individual autonomy but also we give others more opportunity to control us. You're right about LibO, we need it more than ever nowadays.
- tompccs 5y agoStalin could have only dreamed of such things.
- mildmotive 5y ago“The lion ripped the gazelle to shreds.” Gets auto-corrected to “The bourgeois ripped the gazelle to shreds.”
- puskavi 5y agoGreat. /s
- christmm 5y ago[dead]
- arsdragonfly 5y ago
- james-redwood 5y agoI'd believe it if it came from a more reliable source than the Sun. More often than not their content is complete and utter drivel.