Seriously?

Two signs seen around campus:

ASG campaign sign: "Making Yesterday's Ideas Tomorrow's Reality"

Red Cross Blood Drive: "Recycle Life--give blood!"

Seriously, people? Do you even think about what words mean??

(Back to my thesis. I'm >this< close to being finished...)

The Spell-Check Trap

Microsoft Word has a handy feature, Spell-Check that many people rely on too much. For one thing, they don't bother to try to spell things properly, relying on a machine to do their thinking, and for another, when they run spell check they don't pay attention to the suggestions and just click "replace all". And don't even get me started on that horrible grammar check (It always accuses me of having fragments. There's a subject, and there's a verb. It's a sentence!)

Anyway, my post today is that I've fallen into the spell-check trap, thanks to the Mozilla Firefox built in spell checker that puts little red squiggles under words and offers suggestions. I sometimes ignore it since it doesn't recognize certain words that are correct spellings, but I frequently rely on it to catch my errors instead of typing/reading carefully like I used to do.

My problem is that now that I have it whenever I use the Internet, I notice the lack of it when I do other things, like Google chat, etc. I want there to be red marks under the words I've spelled wrong to make sure I'm typing the correct spellings! When I felt a little irritated that there were none, I realized that I'd fallen away from my proud stance of not being dependent on machines for writing to...well...relying on machines. Am I going to expect a red line to jet out from my ink pen now when I write?

Luckily there are still some things that I don't need a computer to tell me, like the differences among write, wright, and right. Or knowing when to use "between" and "among".

Anyone else find themselves relying on spell-check a little too much?