“Why do we have to practice spelling?” the young man asked in all sincerity as he struggled to get assiduous correctly on paper. “We have spellcheckers to take of that for us now. Nobody needs to know how to spell any more.”

It was time for a lesson in the Cupertino Effect.

For all their appearance of magic, spellcheckers are just software running algorithms. Type in “I need a loaf of braed,” and the famous red underline appears, prompting some attention. But if you forget to space inthe middle of in the, some spellcheckers make the correction automatically. Similarly, students who type in the pronoun I without capitalizing it often find that the spellchecker capitalizes for them. When they work well, spellcheckers are a wonderful convenience for people who occasionally mistype something.

When spellcheckers were new, however, some fine-tuning was still needed. The most famous glitch involved the word co-operation. For the typist who remembered the hyphen, all was well. The typist who adopted the newer style and omitted the hyphen was faced with a red underline: the spellchecker didn’t recognize cooperation. If, in haste or uncertainty, the typist accepted whatever the spellchecker recommended as a correction, cooperation became Cupertino, the town in northern California that is home to Apple Computers. This led to some red faces, especially in Europe, where a German NATO officer was reported saying, “The Cupertino with our Italian comrades proved to be very fruitful.” A proposal from the European Union’s Scientific and Technical Research Committee called for “stimulating cross-border Cupertino.”

Spellcheckers are better now, but the responsibility to learn to spell remains.

Ben Zimmer’s blog on the Cupertino Effect has more examples, as does The Language Log.

Posted Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:01:22 and filed under Writing, Technology, Vocabulary. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.