Don’t trust spellcheck 100%
I’m doing some research about The Anarchy (one of the historical backgrounds for “A Song of Ice and Fire”, as well as Ken Follett’s 1989 “Pillars of the Earth” and George Shipway’s 1969 “Knight in Anarchy”.
(Shipway’s novel is worth finding not just because it’s grimdark long before the term was ever imagined, but because of the current GoT resonance. Its hero refuses to acknowledge that the charismatic overlord he honours and loves has dangerous flaws, and follows him down a spiral of tyranny, slaughter and finally madness until the world falls in around them. Tropes repeat, and seeing how different stories treat them is both entertainment and education.)
Last night when I saved an on-line article as a Word docx file, the spellchecker automatically found and flagged a single “spelling error”.
I don’t know enough about software programming to guess at why this particular tagging happened, and though I’ve used hoard / horde often enough I can’t recall seeing it before.
Homophones - words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings - are awkward enough in speech and can be even more problematic when written down since, as shown here, if the software says “wrong” and the word’s unfamiliar enough, there’s a risk of making a mistake. (Voice-to-text makes things even more interesting...)
Peal of bells, peel of oranges; breech of a gun, breach in a wall...
“I’ve seen the scene where he sees her seize the reins of power; she starts her reign of fear with a rain of fire.”
Pronunciation and accent can help or hinder clarity; @dduane said “Ouch!”
There’s a long, long list of homophones, usually made clear by context, though it doesn’t prevent high-profile mistakes. For example, this isn’t UK vs US spelling, it’s a blunder...
I have a private feeling that “The New Kid - Tony Stark takes reins at 21” and “The New King - Tony Stark reigns at 21″ were both considered for cover copy and, when the decision was made, one vital word got mixed up.
A hoard of coins is correct, so is a horde of barbarians, but there’s no such thing as a horde of coins or a hoard of barbarians.
Here’s my rule of thumb - “hoard” means a collection of inanimate objects, usually hidden - treasure, money, foodstuffs - while “horde” means an unruly mob of living creatures - insects, animals, humans.
If there are exceptions, I can’t think of them right now, though to add more complication the real-but-uncommon word “hording” means people gathering together - “Trek fans were hording at one end of the hall, Wars fans at the other” -while more commonly, (compulsive) “hoarding” is a disorder but “a hoarding” is an advertising billboard. Again, those can all be told apart in context, though Google has just shown me cross-spelling errors for each and every one...
If you’ve written something that you’re sure is correct but your spellchecker claims isn’t, get a second opinion by opening a tab or (preferably) pulling down a dictionary.
Mum and Dad gave me this one when I was quite small...
...but forgot to mention I didn’t need to read it from cover to cover. I did that very thing over the next couple of weeks, with the result that...
Well, not quite that bad, at least once the vexatious entertainment concomitant with exercising my enhanced lexical prowess wore off.
Also people started throwing things at me, and the things started getting heavy.
But when I write that an artisan is a wright, I’m right.
No matter who says otherwise...
