Friday, April 18, 2008

Geo-jargon 3: battle of the spellcheck

(Note: this is a follow-up to my post on jargon that we should ditch and Maria's post on jargon that should return from the dead.)

I used to get really annoyed about MS Word's standard spell-checker with geology terms. It's gotten a bit better - it knows how to spell "plagioclase" now - but it still marks a lot of geologic terms as misspelled.

But now, it's mostly a source of entertainment - at least when Word has suggestions for replacements:

Anastomosing... Anatomizing
Cataclastic... Cataclysmic
Cataclasis... Catalysis
Orogeny... Progeny
Phyllic... Phallic
Phyllite... Phillies
Listric... Lipstick
Rheology... Theology

(And spell-check doesn't replace "asses" with "assess," to the humiliation of many speakers over the years.)

Do you have any favorite suggested replacements?

(Thanks to my students for telling me about some of these.)

7 comments:

Suvrat Kher said...

being a Sed Pet guy-

Lithic - litchi

Wackestone- jackstone


Arenite - Arsenate

:-)

Silver Fox said...

I don't know about Word, but blogger spellcheck does some weird ones sometimes!

plutonic - platoons
slickensides - xylophonists (!??)
sodic - stoic
calcic - calico
batholith - biathlon

And for unconformity, it suggests nonconformity, as though it knows which word I should use!

ScienceWoman said...

I blame word for the famous misprint on page 2 of my dissertation, in which I discussed the seduction of a tectonic plate.

Julian said...

Last summer, I worked in a music library, and one of my duties was to help type the table of contents fields out for gajillions of books of medieval and Renaissance music, all in Latin. Word did not like this, but it provided enough hilarious corrections to write a whole new "Latin piece" with the replacement English words.
For a sentence involving "Nostri" and "Sancto Francesco," it suggested "Nostrils" and "San Francisco"; if I ever write that fake motet, it will be called "The Nostrils of San Francisco."

C W Magee said...

Vitrinite is the best.

Kim said...

I'm not sure whether vitrinite or subduction win for the funniest. Vitrinite definitely has the edge, for having two good suggestions.

Elli said...

Symplectite -> Simplicity
(its meta reaction lecture tomorrow)