14 ms·

Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

118 points by ripe 3y ago

otteromkram 3y ago
> Write a word ending in "-ise" and it will suggest changing it to "-ize" [...] Sounds like it's working fine to me. Joking aside, this is a great article with many strong points, but disabling or mitigating spellcheck is always a possibility. I usually disable it since many of the grammar suggestions Word provides are questionable. In a workplace setting when consistency is key, it seems like grammar and spellcheck are essential utilities.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  WinEdt has like 5 dictionaries for Genghis. The "normal" one. One with -ise, one with -ize, one with -ice. One with color, one with colour. And perhaps others that I don't remember. The idea is that you can combine them to make en-us, en-uk or any of the other variants you prefer.
- csydas 3y ago
  Spellchecks are fine usually but I have not yet found one I like when it comes to auto-correcting, as I cannot seem to get the rhythm when I'm trying to type and seeing my words and writing change without my interaction is very distracting. I also don't really like the way of "teaching" new words to most auto-corrects (macOS gets it right I think, just right-click the word the OS doesn't recognise and select "Learn"), but I remember it being far more annoying on other OSes. Similarly my frustration with Office is that depending on how you access it (web version, office 365, within Teams, etc), it's been my experience that the configuration/preferences are not carried over so it's just very annoying to know that despite Office365 being so connected, depending on how I use Office365 my preferences aren't carried over. I would vastly prefer if spellchecks and auto-corrects were more restrained in what they tried to fix. A lot of the grammar changes are inane typically or treating stylistic choices as grammar mistakes. Probably Office just isn't for me but I think it changes the writing enough in many cases that the meaning is lost.
- lozenge 3y ago
  I would rather receive an email with a letter missing than have it autocorrected/hastily corrected before sending to a word that it shouldn't be.
- pm215 3y ago
  I think the point the article is trying to make there is about the power of defaults. Sure, you can disable the grammar and spellcheck (I do that too), or you can configure it to specifically UK English and otherwise adjust it, but most users will not, and so on aggregate the choice of default setting will exert some pressure on the user base.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Tbh I find most UK spellcheck's determination to replace "-ize" (a valid spelling in British English which the Oxford English Dictionary actually prefers for most words) with "-ise" even more annoying...
    - bloak 3y ago
      That one should be a configuration option. Most British publishers (I think) use -ise, but some use -ize, and no publisher would be happy with a paragraph in which both spellings are used (unless they are in quotations in an academic text).
  - fostware 3y ago
    For a good few years, Word's English (Australian) dictionary, was practically a renamed EN_US dictionary. Because if it, I fear the number of people from that era had their spelling localization errors metastasize and crystalize. (Yes, Chrome is not far behind)
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  If consistency is what you're after, then Word doesn't provide it. Even if you set the language to en-UK, it has a habit of conveniently forgetting every now and again and trying to change all your words back to US versions. This is why Word is changing language - its repeated gaslighting is at abusive level, and many people are too worn down by it to maintain their standards.
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
> Word introduced line breaks, along with bold and italic fonts on screen. Forgot about WordStar? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  On screen. It’s talking about the WYSIWYG paradigm, which WordStar didn’t do, judging by that screenshot.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    From the wikipedia entry > WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and textual WYSIWYG. They produced a bunch of different versions, and that screenshot is for an MS-DOS version.
  - HarryHirsch 3y ago
    Under Windows 3.1 it had this feature where it would show you WYSIWYG text, but you could ask it to show you the markup as well. It was wonderful, and MS Word can't do it to this present day!
matsemann 3y ago
I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures. Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages, different regions etc. I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more. Examples include bad dictionaries in other languages. Bad or no translations. And for instance in Norwegian we quote things like «ord» or „ord“, but all software I use do or makes it harder than just doing "ord". US systems assumes all addresses uses zip codes. My name contains a letter not in ascii, breaking lots of systems. I can't use vpn at work if I'm in a city with the letter Ø in it as some go proxy geoip location thingy crashes. ChatGPT can output in my language, but the language is stiff and feels off. If I ask it to rhyme, it doesn't but if I were to translate back to English it rhymes. Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when. Or how things are moderated to an US standard. In Scandinavia boobs are fine, and in Danish newspapers you'd see them all the time. With global networks, we're now moderating to American "prudeness". I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized. Word uses quotes ok and grammar is not terrible. Except it for decades have insisted on writing internet with a capital I for some reason, which we don't do.
- tomrod 3y ago
  I appreciate your thoughts. You made me realize AM (antemeridian, before noon) and post meridian (after noon, 24 hours mod 12) aren't universal standards!
  - bregma 3y ago
    Not even in the USA.
  - Lukas_Skywalker 3y ago
    Noon and midnight are especially difficult for people used to the 24 hour system. Noon is neither ante nor post meridiem. And midnight is both.
phpnode 3y ago
It is upsetting to hear the phrase “turn of the century” used to describe the year 2000. I know it’s correct, but it still feels very wrong.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Almost as wrong to me as the friendly jab I got from a teenager last week about “being born in the 1900s.”
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    Oooh! Nice burn, kid! It still makes me do mental arithmetic when someone gives post 2000 as a birthdate. Shit, my nephew was born post 2010 and he’s twelve which is weird because 2010 was like, three years ago.
donatj 3y ago
This article, with its run on sentences, and overuse of comas, was likely not, written in Word, as it would have, complained.
cubefox 3y ago
I remember that Word's German spell checker started quite early to only accept the spelling "E-Mail" as correct. This was at a time when emails were fairly new, and spellings like "eMail" were also common. (Though not "email", as nouns are capitalized in German.) I'm pretty confident that Word played a significant role in "E-Mail" becoming the canonically accepted German spelling.
- Skeime 3y ago
  It also happens to be aligned with how other similar words are written (S-Bahn, U-Boot, …), so I think it was likely to become that anyway.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Yeah, orthographically it was the most sensible choice.
cebert 3y ago
I was in middle school in the late 1990’s. Microsoft Word and Encarta were popular with some students, but the teachers weren’t necessarily tech savvy. If you copied text from an encyclopedia entry in Encarta to Word, the text would change to red burgundy. Students would copy content in their papers and wouldn’t even bother to change the color. I remember seeing examples of good papers in the hallways with the red text, and couldn’t believe that teachers had no idea what had happened.
- macintux 3y ago
  I was in the IT industry in the late 90s and this is the first I've heard of it. Not surprised teachers weren't in the loop.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  Modern version is text copied from Wikipedia[1][2]. [1]: Where the student forgot to delete the citation footnotes. [2]: Or, if they're really not paying attention, maybe even a wild [citation needed].
karaterobot 3y ago
Pretty thin soup here. Basically, the argument comes down to grammar and spelling suggestions, and then a couple of other features like document templates. I would need stronger evidence to believe that Word's grammar suggestions have empirically affected the language people use—outside Word itself, possibly. It would be much more tenable to say that Word influences how people write Word documents, but they seem to be saying the languages of the world have been influenced in some marked way by it, which I haven't observed. Nor did I observe a lot of evidence in that article, as opposed to speculation.
- kqr 3y ago
  As far as myself go, predictive typing systems have a definitive effect on how I write (qualitatively and stylometrically), and this is the reason I avoid them. I want to use the words in my head, not the ones in the machine. At least until recently it's not been up to par.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    I use SwiftKey, it is the best one I've found as it will remember the sequence of words previously used, which are common things I often say, so their predictive text is often much better than Google's for example.
demondemidi 3y ago
MSWord is the ultimate benchmark. It’s been around since the Pc revolution started. Ironically it hasn’t gotten much better in those 30 years since I first started using it. The new features have broken core features, and performance has gone backwards. It is the perfect example of feature creep and over engineering that ultimately worsens usability. If I had enough vintage pcs I would do a 40 year analysis to answer why it’s gotten so much worse. Ive been using word since 1991. I recently started a new job, got a fancy HP laptop, and I swear word ran faster on my 386SX than it does on this i9. Turn on “all markup” after a few people have edited it, and there’s a 2 second delay between keystrokes.
Kwpolska 3y ago
> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance. > "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Word in professional and technical fields has led to the borrowing of English terms and structures, which contribute to the trend of linguistic homogenisation." Uh, what? Microsoft Word is available in dozens of languages, with spell checking available. I was able to find a copy of Word 3.0 (1986) in German on a certain well-known old-software site. If you tell modern Word your text is in German, it will underline non-English words, and if you tell it your text is in British English, it will probably complain about your mention of your "favorite color".
- mejutoco 3y ago
  And even the shortcuts are localized. A Spanish Word installation will use ctrl+g (guardar) instead of ctrl+s (save), for instance.
- voiceblue 3y ago
  Your last sentence is hinting on something that actually has more bearing on technology effecting language: HTML. When I was first learning HTML & CSS it irked me to have to spell "colour" wrong to get things working. Now I just use the US American spelling everywhere (it helps that I'm currently in the US).
  - lemoncucumber 3y ago
    That’s still not as bad as having to spell referrer wrong in http headers where it’s spelled “referer”... which is incorrect for every flavo(u)r of English.
    - spydum 3y ago
      I remember writing a logging method for a webserver forever ago, and could not for the life of me, understand why my Referrer values were not getting logged. Finally looked at the headers, and thought it was a bug in the browser I was testing. Took way too long to figure out the problem.
FFP999 3y ago
> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. As if American movies, music, and TV weren't already a major export when Gates was practically still in diapers.
cxrlosfx 3y ago
Are human beings responsible for changing how they use their own language? Or is just Word responsible for that? Maybe MS Word is just changing things so fast that we are able to notice it, but the languages we use and the ways we comunicate have changed over time and will keep changing.
- pictureofabear 3y ago
  I think humans are easily influenced by programs that autocorrect/autocomplete grammar and spelling. I notice a huge stylistic difference in articles written today compared to twenty years ago. There seemed to be much more variety and colorful language. Today, the trend is concise, simple sentences.
aj7 3y ago
What an awful article. To this day, using Word involves tricking Word into doing what you want. You get better at this over time. Word has always been a ubiquitous, necessary evil.
vtns 3y ago
Word is a tool, and any tool we use changes the way we see the world and interact with it. Hammer –> nails and all that. I'd say the article missed the mark by focusing on features, especially spellcheck/autocorrect. It's like some sort of cognitive blindness: I mean, the article has a photo with typists at the office and yet it competely ignores the transformation that an engine/platform – a computer – with a tool – a word processor – had on the way language is used in business, leisure, creative and, of course, language work (anything from print or editing to business memos). A hammer can have a flavor, but it's still a hammer. This article focuses on the objectionable and weak flavor of MS Word while ignoring the wider implications of a digital word processor.
teekert 3y ago
I’m Dutch, and the ways autocorrect changes my language, and I guess the German language as well, is not so subtle. We have a rule that when something is one “thing” like a “biophysics group”, we make it one word (Biofysicagroep). But almost any form of autocorrect will split these words. I’m really tired of correcting it all the time and I guess many others with me.
- olejorgenb 3y ago
  Same for norwegian
  - teekert 3y ago
    We have a website for this (pretty low key, but fun) [0]. Sometimes adding a space changes the meaning of a sentence, and sometimes in a funny way. Like, "weekbroodje" is sandwich of the week, but "week broodje" is a mushy sandwich. Maybe it's because "week" can be "week" or "mushy". The same happens for "Corona cases", which, in Dutch with a space (Corona gevallen) means "Corona fell", the proper way is "Coronagevallen". Usually it is clear what is meant from context but a sentence that starts out the wrong way can trip you up for a moment. Almost all spell checkers will split these examples so it's really changing our language. I have considered filing a bug with Apple because I mostly notice it on my iPhone. Perhaps it's already to late, wrong space use is very pervasive nowadays. [0] https://www.spatiegebruik.nl/ https://www.spatiegebruik.nl/
btown 3y ago
Certainly when it comes to computer software causing language to change far outside the sphere of computing terms, TikTok takes the cake, with words like "unalive" joining the real-world lexicon: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/algospeak-tiktok-le-dollar-bean/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/algospe... is a fascinating read for those unfamiliar with Gen Z jargon. But the OP article briefly raises an interesting point by way of linking to and quoting https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171308 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171308 : > Analysis of the screen recording data revealed that students were more apt to make microstructural rather than macrostructural changes to their work and that they continuously revised at all stages of their writing. The idea that we can easily make non-append-only changes to our text simply by moving a mouse or trackpad may very well change how we think about language. A less severe version, perhaps, of the phenomenon in the movie Arrival and Ted Chiang's novella Story of Your Life (highly worth a read, and easily accessible with a quick search), where learning an alien language changes a person's entire outlook on - well, to minimize spoilers, every aspect of how life is lived. Perhaps, insofar as I typed the word "perhaps" after I wrote the rest of the forthcoming sentence... we already live in a world where something like this has transpired.
uncomputation 3y ago
TLDR: Word standardizes text through: - Document templates - English as lingua franca - Auto correct and completion Whether or not you agree (I personally do not find it convincing) it up to you, but there’s a summary because the article is very long-winded.
rkagerer 3y ago
I made good use of Word's built-in thesaurus while growing up, and I'm pretty sure it boosted my writing grades slightly as teachers were impressed by the expanded diction. These days I find thesauruses a great aid to more precisely describe what I'm trying to convey, or help me find that word that's on the tip of my tongue.
pornel 3y ago
There are two cases in Polish where inaccurate translations in Windows have changed the Polish language. Font has been translated as "czcionka", which in Polish originally meant sort (a metal block for a single letter). Cancel has been translated as "anuluj" (to revoke, abolish). This happened at the time when computers have exploded in popularity in Poland, and the terms have been assimilated along with all other computer jargon. Later attempts to correct the translations ("krój pisma", "poniechaj") have failed due to sounding like a pedantic deviation from an already established terminology. So Polish message boxes have [OK] and [Abolish] buttons.
aitchnyu 3y ago
In English letter writing lessons here in India, our teachers said date, place and signature were supposed to be right aligned but completely left aligned text is catching on due to computers. I'm 1989 born, but we were using DOS programs even as a teen.
ruytlm 3y ago
I look forward to the same article in 40 years about how LLMs have butchered everything, given that they're essentially doing the same thing around predictive text and autocorrect.

118 points by ripe 3y ago

> Write a word ending in "-ise" and it will suggest changing it to "-ize" [...] Sounds like it's working fine to me. Joking aside, this is a great article with many strong points, but disabling or mitigating spellcheck is always a possibility. I usually disable it since many of the grammar suggestions Word provides are questionable. In a workplace setting when consistency is key, it seems like grammar and spellcheck are essential utilities.

gus_massa 3y ago
WinEdt has like 5 dictionaries for Genghis. The "normal" one. One with -ise, one with -ize, one with -ice. One with color, one with colour. And perhaps others that I don't remember. The idea is that you can combine them to make en-us, en-uk or any of the other variants you prefer.
csydas 3y ago
Spellchecks are fine usually but I have not yet found one I like when it comes to auto-correcting, as I cannot seem to get the rhythm when I'm trying to type and seeing my words and writing change without my interaction is very distracting. I also don't really like the way of "teaching" new words to most auto-corrects (macOS gets it right I think, just right-click the word the OS doesn't recognise and select "Learn"), but I remember it being far more annoying on other OSes. Similarly my frustration with Office is that depending on how you access it (web version, office 365, within Teams, etc), it's been my experience that the configuration/preferences are not carried over so it's just very annoying to know that despite Office365 being so connected, depending on how I use Office365 my preferences aren't carried over. I would vastly prefer if spellchecks and auto-corrects were more restrained in what they tried to fix. A lot of the grammar changes are inane typically or treating stylistic choices as grammar mistakes. Probably Office just isn't for me but I think it changes the writing enough in many cases that the meaning is lost.
lozenge 3y ago
I would rather receive an email with a letter missing than have it autocorrected/hastily corrected before sending to a word that it shouldn't be.
pm215 3y ago
I think the point the article is trying to make there is about the power of defaults. Sure, you can disable the grammar and spellcheck (I do that too), or you can configure it to specifically UK English and otherwise adjust it, but most users will not, and so on aggregate the choice of default setting will exert some pressure on the user base.
- notahacker 3y ago
  Tbh I find most UK spellcheck's determination to replace "-ize" (a valid spelling in British English which the Oxford English Dictionary actually prefers for most words) with "-ise" even more annoying...
  - bloak 3y ago
    That one should be a configuration option. Most British publishers (I think) use -ise, but some use -ize, and no publisher would be happy with a paragraph in which both spellings are used (unless they are in quotations in an academic text).
- fostware 3y ago
  For a good few years, Word's English (Australian) dictionary, was practically a renamed EN_US dictionary. Because if it, I fear the number of people from that era had their spelling localization errors metastasize and crystalize. (Yes, Chrome is not far behind)
mnw21cam 3y ago
If consistency is what you're after, then Word doesn't provide it. Even if you set the language to en-UK, it has a habit of conveniently forgetting every now and again and trying to change all your words back to US versions. This is why Word is changing language - its repeated gaslighting is at abusive level, and many people are too worn down by it to maintain their standards.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago

> Word introduced line breaks, along with bold and italic fonts on screen. Forgot about WordStar? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar

chrismorgan 3y ago
On screen. It’s talking about the WYSIWYG paradigm, which WordStar didn’t do, judging by that screenshot.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  From the wikipedia entry > WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and textual WYSIWYG. They produced a bunch of different versions, and that screenshot is for an MS-DOS version.
- HarryHirsch 3y ago
  Under Windows 3.1 it had this feature where it would show you WYSIWYG text, but you could ask it to show you the markup as well. It was wonderful, and MS Word can't do it to this present day!

matsemann 3y ago

I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures. Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages, different regions etc. I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more. Examples include bad dictionaries in other languages. Bad or no translations. And for instance in Norwegian we quote things like «ord» or „ord“, but all software I use do or makes it harder than just doing "ord". US systems assumes all addresses uses zip codes. My name contains a letter not in ascii, breaking lots of systems. I can't use vpn at work if I'm in a city with the letter Ø in it as some go proxy geoip location thingy crashes. ChatGPT can output in my language, but the language is stiff and feels off. If I ask it to rhyme, it doesn't but if I were to translate back to English it rhymes. Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when. Or how things are moderated to an US standard. In Scandinavia boobs are fine, and in Danish newspapers you'd see them all the time. With global networks, we're now moderating to American "prudeness". I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized. Word uses quotes ok and grammar is not terrible. Except it for decades have insisted on writing internet with a capital I for some reason, which we don't do.

tomrod 3y ago
I appreciate your thoughts. You made me realize AM (antemeridian, before noon) and post meridian (after noon, 24 hours mod 12) aren't universal standards!
- bregma 3y ago
  Not even in the USA.
- Lukas_Skywalker 3y ago
  Noon and midnight are especially difficult for people used to the 24 hour system. Noon is neither ante nor post meridiem. And midnight is both.

phpnode 3y ago

It is upsetting to hear the phrase “turn of the century” used to describe the year 2000. I know it’s correct, but it still feels very wrong.

Waterluvian 3y ago
Almost as wrong to me as the friendly jab I got from a teenager last week about “being born in the 1900s.”
- jamiek88 3y ago
  Oooh! Nice burn, kid! It still makes me do mental arithmetic when someone gives post 2000 as a birthdate. Shit, my nephew was born post 2010 and he’s twelve which is weird because 2010 was like, three years ago.

donatj 3y ago

This article, with its run on sentences, and overuse of comas, was likely not, written in Word, as it would have, complained.

cubefox 3y ago

I remember that Word's German spell checker started quite early to only accept the spelling "E-Mail" as correct. This was at a time when emails were fairly new, and spellings like "eMail" were also common. (Though not "email", as nouns are capitalized in German.) I'm pretty confident that Word played a significant role in "E-Mail" becoming the canonically accepted German spelling.

Skeime 3y ago
It also happens to be aligned with how other similar words are written (S-Bahn, U-Boot, …), so I think it was likely to become that anyway.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Yeah, orthographically it was the most sensible choice.

cebert 3y ago

I was in middle school in the late 1990’s. Microsoft Word and Encarta were popular with some students, but the teachers weren’t necessarily tech savvy. If you copied text from an encyclopedia entry in Encarta to Word, the text would change to red burgundy. Students would copy content in their papers and wouldn’t even bother to change the color. I remember seeing examples of good papers in the hallways with the red text, and couldn’t believe that teachers had no idea what had happened.

macintux 3y ago
I was in the IT industry in the late 90s and this is the first I've heard of it. Not surprised teachers weren't in the loop.
duskwuff 3y ago
Modern version is text copied from Wikipedia[1][2]. [1]: Where the student forgot to delete the citation footnotes. [2]: Or, if they're really not paying attention, maybe even a wild [citation needed].

karaterobot 3y ago

Pretty thin soup here. Basically, the argument comes down to grammar and spelling suggestions, and then a couple of other features like document templates. I would need stronger evidence to believe that Word's grammar suggestions have empirically affected the language people use—outside Word itself, possibly. It would be much more tenable to say that Word influences how people write Word documents, but they seem to be saying the languages of the world have been influenced in some marked way by it, which I haven't observed. Nor did I observe a lot of evidence in that article, as opposed to speculation.

kqr 3y ago
As far as myself go, predictive typing systems have a definitive effect on how I write (qualitatively and stylometrically), and this is the reason I avoid them. I want to use the words in my head, not the ones in the machine. At least until recently it's not been up to par.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  I use SwiftKey, it is the best one I've found as it will remember the sequence of words previously used, which are common things I often say, so their predictive text is often much better than Google's for example.

demondemidi 3y ago

MSWord is the ultimate benchmark. It’s been around since the Pc revolution started. Ironically it hasn’t gotten much better in those 30 years since I first started using it. The new features have broken core features, and performance has gone backwards. It is the perfect example of feature creep and over engineering that ultimately worsens usability. If I had enough vintage pcs I would do a 40 year analysis to answer why it’s gotten so much worse. Ive been using word since 1991. I recently started a new job, got a fancy HP laptop, and I swear word ran faster on my 386SX than it does on this i9. Turn on “all markup” after a few people have edited it, and there’s a 2 second delay between keystrokes.

Kwpolska 3y ago

> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance. > "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Word in professional and technical fields has led to the borrowing of English terms and structures, which contribute to the trend of linguistic homogenisation." Uh, what? Microsoft Word is available in dozens of languages, with spell checking available. I was able to find a copy of Word 3.0 (1986) in German on a certain well-known old-software site. If you tell modern Word your text is in German, it will underline non-English words, and if you tell it your text is in British English, it will probably complain about your mention of your "favorite color".

mejutoco 3y ago
And even the shortcuts are localized. A Spanish Word installation will use ctrl+g (guardar) instead of ctrl+s (save), for instance.
voiceblue 3y ago
Your last sentence is hinting on something that actually has more bearing on technology effecting language: HTML. When I was first learning HTML & CSS it irked me to have to spell "colour" wrong to get things working. Now I just use the US American spelling everywhere (it helps that I'm currently in the US).
- lemoncucumber 3y ago
  That’s still not as bad as having to spell referrer wrong in http headers where it’s spelled “referer”... which is incorrect for every flavo(u)r of English.
  - spydum 3y ago
    I remember writing a logging method for a webserver forever ago, and could not for the life of me, understand why my Referrer values were not getting logged. Finally looked at the headers, and thought it was a bug in the browser I was testing. Took way too long to figure out the problem.

FFP999 3y ago

> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. As if American movies, music, and TV weren't already a major export when Gates was practically still in diapers.

cxrlosfx 3y ago

Are human beings responsible for changing how they use their own language? Or is just Word responsible for that? Maybe MS Word is just changing things so fast that we are able to notice it, but the languages we use and the ways we comunicate have changed over time and will keep changing.

pictureofabear 3y ago
I think humans are easily influenced by programs that autocorrect/autocomplete grammar and spelling. I notice a huge stylistic difference in articles written today compared to twenty years ago. There seemed to be much more variety and colorful language. Today, the trend is concise, simple sentences.

aj7 3y ago

What an awful article. To this day, using Word involves tricking Word into doing what you want. You get better at this over time. Word has always been a ubiquitous, necessary evil.

vtns 3y ago

Word is a tool, and any tool we use changes the way we see the world and interact with it. Hammer –> nails and all that. I'd say the article missed the mark by focusing on features, especially spellcheck/autocorrect. It's like some sort of cognitive blindness: I mean, the article has a photo with typists at the office and yet it competely ignores the transformation that an engine/platform – a computer – with a tool – a word processor – had on the way language is used in business, leisure, creative and, of course, language work (anything from print or editing to business memos). A hammer can have a flavor, but it's still a hammer. This article focuses on the objectionable and weak flavor of MS Word while ignoring the wider implications of a digital word processor.

teekert 3y ago

I’m Dutch, and the ways autocorrect changes my language, and I guess the German language as well, is not so subtle. We have a rule that when something is one “thing” like a “biophysics group”, we make it one word (Biofysicagroep). But almost any form of autocorrect will split these words. I’m really tired of correcting it all the time and I guess many others with me.

olejorgenb 3y ago
Same for norwegian
- teekert 3y ago
  We have a website for this (pretty low key, but fun) [0]. Sometimes adding a space changes the meaning of a sentence, and sometimes in a funny way. Like, "weekbroodje" is sandwich of the week, but "week broodje" is a mushy sandwich. Maybe it's because "week" can be "week" or "mushy". The same happens for "Corona cases", which, in Dutch with a space (Corona gevallen) means "Corona fell", the proper way is "Coronagevallen". Usually it is clear what is meant from context but a sentence that starts out the wrong way can trip you up for a moment. Almost all spell checkers will split these examples so it's really changing our language. I have considered filing a bug with Apple because I mostly notice it on my iPhone. Perhaps it's already to late, wrong space use is very pervasive nowadays. [0] https://www.spatiegebruik.nl/ https://www.spatiegebruik.nl/

btown 3y ago

Certainly when it comes to computer software causing language to change far outside the sphere of computing terms, TikTok takes the cake, with words like "unalive" joining the real-world lexicon: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/algospeak-tiktok-le-dollar-bean/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/algospe... is a fascinating read for those unfamiliar with Gen Z jargon. But the OP article briefly raises an interesting point by way of linking to and quoting https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171308 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171308 : > Analysis of the screen recording data revealed that students were more apt to make microstructural rather than macrostructural changes to their work and that they continuously revised at all stages of their writing. The idea that we can easily make non-append-only changes to our text simply by moving a mouse or trackpad may very well change how we think about language. A less severe version, perhaps, of the phenomenon in the movie Arrival and Ted Chiang's novella Story of Your Life (highly worth a read, and easily accessible with a quick search), where learning an alien language changes a person's entire outlook on - well, to minimize spoilers, every aspect of how life is lived. Perhaps, insofar as I typed the word "perhaps" after I wrote the rest of the forthcoming sentence... we already live in a world where something like this has transpired.

uncomputation 3y ago

TLDR: Word standardizes text through: - Document templates - English as lingua franca - Auto correct and completion Whether or not you agree (I personally do not find it convincing) it up to you, but there’s a summary because the article is very long-winded.

rkagerer 3y ago

I made good use of Word's built-in thesaurus while growing up, and I'm pretty sure it boosted my writing grades slightly as teachers were impressed by the expanded diction. These days I find thesauruses a great aid to more precisely describe what I'm trying to convey, or help me find that word that's on the tip of my tongue.

pornel 3y ago

There are two cases in Polish where inaccurate translations in Windows have changed the Polish language. Font has been translated as "czcionka", which in Polish originally meant sort (a metal block for a single letter). Cancel has been translated as "anuluj" (to revoke, abolish). This happened at the time when computers have exploded in popularity in Poland, and the terms have been assimilated along with all other computer jargon. Later attempts to correct the translations ("krój pisma", "poniechaj") have failed due to sounding like a pedantic deviation from an already established terminology. So Polish message boxes have [OK] and [Abolish] buttons.

aitchnyu 3y ago

In English letter writing lessons here in India, our teachers said date, place and signature were supposed to be right aligned but completely left aligned text is catching on due to computers. I'm 1989 born, but we were using DOS programs even as a teen.

ruytlm 3y ago

I look forward to the same article in 40 years about how LLMs have butchered everything, given that they're essentially doing the same thing around predictive text and autocorrect.