Bad weather post!

(Uguuu, hurricanes that turn out to not be hurricanes make Selan annoyed.)

So, about spellcheck.
It’s a trap.

Spellcheck is like the greatest thing ever. You spell a word wrong, it tells you and, if it knows what word you were trying to spell, it offers a correction. How great is that? I mean, I’m pretty good at spelling, but I make mistakes too and spellcheck fixes them all for me, like a loyal friend.
But it’s not a loyal friend. Because a loyal friend is human (excluding pets and aliens, I suppose), and a human can understand context.
Context is spellcheck’s worst enemy.
For example, the word “great” is very common. People use it quite a bit. However, it sounds just like the word “grate”. Furthermore, because the two words are spelled with the same letters, just mixed around a bit, it’s easy for someone who does know the correct spelling to accidentally mistype it if they aren’t paying attention. However, since “grate” is also a word, spellcheck won’t catch it. As far as spellcheck knows, you might actually be talking about grates. It’s not about to tell you you’re wrong just because you like to talk about grates.

Other common mistakes I see are:

Minutes / minuets. A minute is a measure of time. A minuet is a type of dance (or a song that goes with said dance).

Definitely / defiantly. If you’re definitely going to do something, you’re absolutely going to do it. If you’re defiantly going to do something, you’re going to do it to defy someone.

So the lesson here is to just be careful. Spellcheck is useful but it isn’t a replacement for careful proofreading.