🚀 go-pugleaf

This isn't a silly hypenation story but does relate to that 
topic in a way.

Years ago (in the days of yore...) yours truly was involved in 
writing a text editor.  Not any old text editor, but a text 
editor that had aspirations of becoming a word processor.

As a step in its metamorphoses I added a 'spell check'. This
involved a number of interesting steps, not the least of which
was the generation of a word dictionary.  At the time I couldn't
find a computer readable verified word list - but I did have 
access to a roomfull of key-to-disk data entry clerks...  Yep,
you guessed it: take a bunch of secretary spellers, hack away
the bindings, pass 'em around and have a verify punch done and
voila: a dictionary.

Or so we thought.

Didn't work, as about 25% of the words in many documents didn't
appear in the spellers.  So we had keypunch (some of whom were 
ready to lynch yours truly...) punch up some children's 
dictionaries.  That did it - it would spell check pretty much 
any document (with the bonus being that I had the most complete 
rules set for hyphenation possible: the words with hypenation
keypunched).

So: we installed it at the boss' wife's Word Processing shop.
(Remember that this was in the olden days before word processor
meant just software, at the time it usually meant dedicated
hardware).  We gave the ladies that did all of the typing a
rudimentary understanding of the spell checker (just select 
this on the menu and the system will stop of each mispelled
word) and let 'em have at it.

Later that day one of the ladies in their office called me, 
complaining that the spell checker didn't work.  I asked her
what word had been missed and she that it missed the word "for"
when it had been typed as "fro".  I paused, then asked her if
that was spelled as "fro" in "to and fro" or as "fro" in "the
woodworking tool to make shakes andf shingles"... 

Somehow I don't think that she ever understood my question.  I
just removed the word fro from their dictionary.   And: no, I
never did work up a way of checking words based on the usage 
and placement in a sentence.

[this post is being left as it was typed in honor of the subject]

-- 
Russ Kepler - system admininstrator for bbx - Basis International
SNAILMAIL:  5901 Jefferson NE, Albuquerque, NM 87109
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