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I use Microsoft Outlook to send and receive emails. Autocorrect is turned on by default, and I've never been bothered to disable it, as it can be quite useful when my fingers hit stray keys while typing.

For those that don't know, autocorrect discreetly changes typos and bad spelling without making a fuss or drawing your attention to it. It just assumes that the word you typed was wrong, and changes it to the one you probably meant.

Of course, MS Outlook is unable to distinguish between words that are spelled incorrectly, and those that it just doesn't recognise.

SO...

Every Tuesday, I work as a Beaver Scout leader. This week, we were going on a hike, so I sent an email to all the parents, reminding them that their kids should remember to bring their wellies.

MS Outlook didn't recognise the word 'wellies'.

And I didn't notice its substitution until the emails started coming back from bemused parents...

DAMN YOU MICROSOFT!!!

Ooops

As the resident MS representative here, I will certainly pass this along to the Office team at work and see what they come back with.

Autocorrect is a tough one to get right, especially with colloquialisms that get used in different languages which can sometimes very easily get mistaken for spelling mistakes - I'll see if I can get 'Wellies' into the next version of the 'English UK' Dictionary that gets plugged into Office

Sorry........


Sean

But of all the words that could have replaced it....

How did THAT one get added as a normal commonly-used word, when 'wellies' didn't??

Pete

pcwells wrote:How did THAT one get added as a normal commonly-used word, when 'wellies' didn't??

Pete

That's what I'm hoping to find out!!!!!

I'll keep you posted!

When I worked at Abbey National (as it was then) there was a department called ANL (Abbey National Life).

A dyslexic manager fell foul to spell checker when she did not check it's replacements. The management team found it quite amusing and she was teased about it for years after.

My favourite part that was corrected;

"I think it is important that we all meet so we can work together to achieve a good ANL penetration for the coming quarter. As you all know ANL is something quite close to my heart, so it would be good if could all work on encouraging all of our staff to focus on ANL also."

Trés brilliant!

And that really did make me LOL.

Reminds me of a Ross Noble gag. He told the stroy of when he went to watch the World Super Bikes at Phillip Island, he sent a text to a mate saying 'Gone to Phillip Island for WSBKS'. Out of all the words iPhone's predictive messaging could have picked for WSBKS, it picked wanks.

pcwells wrote:I use Microsoft Outlook to send and receive emails. Autocorrect is turned on by default, and I've never been bothered to disable it, as it can be quite useful when my fingers hit stray keys while typing.

For those that don't know, autocorrect discreetly changes typos and bad spelling without making a fuss or drawing your attention to it. It just assumes that the word you typed was wrong, and changes it to the one you probably meant.

Of course, MS Outlook is unable to distinguish between words that are spelled incorrectly, and those that it just doesn't recognise.

SO...

Every Tuesday, I work as a Beaver Scout leader. This week, we were going on a hike, so I sent an email to all the parents, reminding them that their kids should remember to bring their wellies.

MS Outlook didn't recognise the word 'wellies'.

And I didn't notice its substitution until the emails started coming back from bemused parents...

DAMN YOU MICROSOFT!!!

Hahaha... I loathe Outlook, haven't been able to get it to work for years. A Computer Prof I know told me I was better off because it was cr*p... regardless, I fully understand the headache. I just gave a client a handful of mock-up brochures for a project... grammar & spell check went through with flying colors... right!

I re-read the material a week after I'd given it to the client and found at least a half-dozen major screw-ups... so much for proofing your own material and trusting the software.

Now, I know it's just a cultural thing, but in this country (U.S.) "Beaver" pertains to something found in the hip area of a female and when you claimed to lead a group of Beaver Scouts... let's just say some very unusual images popped into my evil mind

Craig Browning wrote: Now, I know it's just a cultural thing, but in this country (U.S.) "Beaver" pertains to something found in the hip area of a female and when you claimed to lead a group of Beaver Scouts... let's just say some very unusual images popped into my evil mind

And therein, I guess, lies the problem! Giving someone 'the willies' is a slang term for uneasiness, etc... whereas 'willy' means something entirely different, particularly here in the UK! Now, I'm not sure if it's down to the age-old problem of American companies not giving a damn (or dang!) about other countries' languages or cultures but it was most definitely a very unfortunate occurence given the context of the mail in question!!

Oh Peter!
That made me laugh!!!
So, have you now been put on some ”special list“ and not allowed near kids?

Fortunately I have used Mac for almost 25 years and don't know Microsoft to well. I just heard that Bill Gates' wife found out on their wedding night why he named the company Micro - soft.

pcwells wrote:MS Outlook didn't recognise the word 'wellies'.

Why can I imagine this ending up as a cutting on The News Quiz?

It's like that time when someone I knew, not me, signed off an email with "regards..." but didn't realise just how close to each other on the keyboard the letters G and T are.

I used to deal with a firm who had very exacting standards and issued their own very specific specification sheets for everything. It was well know that they were OTT on this stuff but suppliers had to go along with it to get the orders. I quoted them for a repeat of a very lucrative job and used the words, ‘All items to be supplied in accordance with your previous specification’. What actually got sent was, ‘to your precious specification'.

Fortunately their buyer saw the funny side and we still got the order!

Yes indeed. For those that don't know British colloquialisms, 'willies' is indeed a commonly-used euphamism for 'tummy bananas'.

I don't think there's any excuse for the Scout organisation adopting the name 'Beavers' for their little 'uns, though. As far as I'm aware, the Beavers was first founded in Canada during the 80s (where they actually have indigenous beavers). I'd have thought that Canada was close enough to the US to have been aware of the word's more vulgar contexts. And it's not as if 'beaver' became a rude word after that. My first encounter with its smutty context was in the movie 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'... Even on these shores, the mention that I'm a Beaver leader gets a Finbar Saunders type response from many.

It seems like every word has now been corrupted to mean something dirty! (Warning: Link is not work-safe!)

Pete

pcwells wrote:'tummy bananas'

Absolute brilliance!

pcwells wrote:I don't think there's any excuse for the Scout organisation adopting the name 'Beavers' for their little 'uns, though. As far as I'm aware, the Beavers was first founded in Canada during the 80s (where they actually have indigenous beavers). I'd have thought that Canada was close enough to the US to have been aware of the word's more vulgar contexts.

Possibly why US junior cub scouts were always called Bobcats. Though I see now they've been renamed Tiger Cubs, to match better with the older Wolf Cubs and Bear Cubs.