Things That Bug Me - That Little Red Squiggly

You guys are going to really start thinking there’s a lot of good planning going on in this here head. They’d be wrong. I know. Can you be quiet for a second and let me talk to the reader(s)?

You can at least maybe believe it, that there’s some forethought and good general writing practice going on, right? You see, in yesterday’s post, I joked about Bill Gates’ little red squiggly on my line about my own retardedness. He and his cronies at Microsoft Word – Department of Red Squigglies and Suggested Replacement Words – or the DRSSR as I like to call them – thought I should have been talking about my own beardedness. Things I find funny: Squiggly is a word according to the DRSSR, Squigglies is not. You just typed Squigglies, again. Yeah, well, what the hell is the correct word for more than one Squiggly? Squiggli? Nope, red squiggly. Squigglys? Nope, red squiggly. Squiggles? Whoa, that passed. So, more than one squiggly is correctly typed (spoken?) as squiggles……in fact, if you right click on Squigglies, Squiggli, or Squigglys – it lists other proper tenses/conjugations of Squiggly for you. The gerund, the nounified verb of doing a squiggly – squiggling. Hey, look, Bobby is good at squiggling. The action of currently making a squiggly? Squiggles. Hey, look at Bobby, he squiggles with his left hand.

Wait a minute! Yeah, I saw it too. Dammit. Squiggles isn’t the plural of Squiggly. It’s the present tense verb for the act of making a squiggly. He squiggles. Bah humbug! So there isn’t a proper plural version of the word Squiggly…..I shake my fist with vigor at you, Bill Gates.

Wow, stellar opening Jay, and look, only took 10 little red squigglies. Ha! You wrote it too. Dammit! I curse you Bill Gates! You just made my day. You know I can make you stab your own eyes out with your pen, right? Yeah. You know I can make you involuntarily shit your pants at work right? Yeah. Then shut it. Fine.

Before I get into the main point of today’s verbal diarrhea, I think the word “Squiggly” is actually an adjective. The line is squiggly. I think the noun would be squiggle. It is a wavy line, it is a squiggle. Or the verb would be squiggle. I will squiggle on this paper. So that plural would be correct at squiggles, or the present tense would be that same squiggles. But don’t rain on this parade Microsoft! Don’t do it. You’re an absolute idiot. Yep. Your point today? Oh yeah….

My accidental tie to yesterday’s post, where I was maybe trying to get an inkling of credit for having some forethought, was to be about things that bug me again. Things That Bug Me – That Little Red Squiggly.

The DRSSR is a funny group. And they’re not very consistent. It’s bothersome. It’s bothersome for someone who types a lot – both for pleasure and employment.

You can’t quote me here, because I forget the misspelling I did actually type, but the other day I was trying to type the word “glue”. It went something like this. Apparently my right hand was placed one key off on the keyboard….so when I went to the “L” key, I hit the “K” key. And subsequently next hit the “Y” key instead of the “U” key. So I started typing “glue” by typing “gky”. Noticing my mistake, I reached up with my pinky to the “backspace” key, but again, with the hand misplaced by a key, I reached up and hit the “=” key instead, twice, one for the “K” and one for the “Y”. At this point, if I remember correctly, I had typed, “gky==”. Thinking of course that I’d backspaced properly, it was time to restart typing “glue”. I start in with the “GL”, only to then see on the screen, “gky==gl”. At this point, flustered, my fingers bounce on or near the remainder of the word and I’ll fix it. So I ended up with something along the lines of “gky==glaue”. And?

Well I’ve got two things to say about this. 1. one of the suggestions for “gky==glaue”, for the correct word, is “glue”. What the fuck? You know I was trying to type “glue” out of that. You can’t tell me that the computers at Microsoft have preprogrammed misspelled words based on the incorrect placement of hands, just off to the left, to include the backspacing, rather “=”, and then the reattempt at the word. You can’t tell me that. No way. Yet, somehow, it knew I was trying to type “glue”. Of course, 2. Copy and paste that “gky==glaue” into your Word. Right click it. It also thought I could have been meaning to type “gay glaze”. Gross, what the hell Jay? I don’t even want to know what that is. I know, I know, only added for gratuitous humor. The point was, I was amazed that it knew, from that, that I was trying to type the word “glue”.

Bringing me to what pisses me off about That Little Red Squiggly. The DRSSR is so friggin smart, it knows that “gky==glaue” is glue – but it can’t decipher other mistakenly typed words. For example, from recent typing of my own, that caused me to start a list for this post.

“unfortunatley” ---- WHAT?? Big brain on Bill Gates. You can’t tell that’s supposed to be “unfortunately”????

“Satruday” ---- Seriously? What the hell other word could I have been meaning to type there?

“comppleted” ---- Yeah, I could see how you maybe didn’t see what I meant there. That’s clearly NOT the word “completed”. In fact, you’re right Bill, I meant to type “bearded”.

[that's not me]