pebblerocker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pebblerocker) wrote2009-09-25 12:08 pm
pebblerocker) wrote2009-09-25 12:08 pm
*kicks computer*
I'm just trying to write and stupid computer keeps underlining words which is really distracting, and I keep on telling it, I tell it over and over I'm not American, I've told it so enough times that when a friend tried to use my computer to register a new hotmail.com email address it refused point blank to give him anything but a hotmail.co.uk one no matter what we did to it, but it's STILL having conniptions about "fibre".
*pants with rage*
Here's what I'm doing. I'm trying to type up a brief story idea using Microsoft Word, which I have chosen because I have co-authors who sometimes send me things in that format and because, unlike Notepad, it gives white margins to the text which makes it easier to read. I had a pile of ideas I wanted to arrange in an easy to find way, so I made several Word documents each with a general heading under which to collect ideas. It made them all with US English dictionary as the default, so when I found out I went through most tediously and changed them all:
Tools > Language > Set Language > Mark selected text as: English (New Zealand), and I left "Detect language automatically" unticked because I had a feeling it might be somewhat prejudiced. Then, because I didn't want to have to go through the whole ceremony again every time I wrote something in a new file, I clicked the "Default..." button and got a text box saying "Do you want to change the default language to English (New Zealand)? This change will affect all new documents based on the NORMAL template." (Because, after all, if you made a new document and it was in foreign, you'd have to go to all the trouble of changing it back, and you don't want that, really, now, do you? Besides, we've already figured out what NORMAL means, and it ain't you, dearie.) So I hit OK on that and hit OK again and saved the changes when I closed the document, and then I made a new Word document in the same folder... and it's defaulted to English (US).
What completely obvious thing have I overlooked? It should have worked. In fact I'm convinced it was deliberately leading me to believe I was doing something that was going to work. I've done the whole thing again several times with no better result except that once I somehow got a message saying that NORMAL is read-only. (Ha fucking ha ha ha.)
I know I could turn off spell-checking entirely and actually proof-read to find those places where in my creative frenzy I've hammered an unorthodox combination of keys. That's what I use it for because mostly I know how to spell. But it's the principle of the thing; I don't want to type away knowing that it's sitting there the whole time carefully NOT telling me that I'm spelling American words wrong. And I know there are people who aren't bothered about things like this, don't notice spelling one way or another, are quite happy to let people guess at the meaning of their alphabet soup of an email -- but I'm not one of those people and I shouldn't have to learn to be one in order to survive in this world.
This is not a rant about hating American spelling, not at all. This is about my identity and not having it dictated to me. For all I care Americans can spell things however they want -- I just wish they'd let me do the same.
*pants with rage*
Here's what I'm doing. I'm trying to type up a brief story idea using Microsoft Word, which I have chosen because I have co-authors who sometimes send me things in that format and because, unlike Notepad, it gives white margins to the text which makes it easier to read. I had a pile of ideas I wanted to arrange in an easy to find way, so I made several Word documents each with a general heading under which to collect ideas. It made them all with US English dictionary as the default, so when I found out I went through most tediously and changed them all:
Tools > Language > Set Language > Mark selected text as: English (New Zealand), and I left "Detect language automatically" unticked because I had a feeling it might be somewhat prejudiced. Then, because I didn't want to have to go through the whole ceremony again every time I wrote something in a new file, I clicked the "Default..." button and got a text box saying "Do you want to change the default language to English (New Zealand)? This change will affect all new documents based on the NORMAL template." (Because, after all, if you made a new document and it was in foreign, you'd have to go to all the trouble of changing it back, and you don't want that, really, now, do you? Besides, we've already figured out what NORMAL means, and it ain't you, dearie.) So I hit OK on that and hit OK again and saved the changes when I closed the document, and then I made a new Word document in the same folder... and it's defaulted to English (US).
What completely obvious thing have I overlooked? It should have worked. In fact I'm convinced it was deliberately leading me to believe I was doing something that was going to work. I've done the whole thing again several times with no better result except that once I somehow got a message saying that NORMAL is read-only. (Ha fucking ha ha ha.)
I know I could turn off spell-checking entirely and actually proof-read to find those places where in my creative frenzy I've hammered an unorthodox combination of keys. That's what I use it for because mostly I know how to spell. But it's the principle of the thing; I don't want to type away knowing that it's sitting there the whole time carefully NOT telling me that I'm spelling American words wrong. And I know there are people who aren't bothered about things like this, don't notice spelling one way or another, are quite happy to let people guess at the meaning of their alphabet soup of an email -- but I'm not one of those people and I shouldn't have to learn to be one in order to survive in this world.
This is not a rant about hating American spelling, not at all. This is about my identity and not having it dictated to me. For all I care Americans can spell things however they want -- I just wish they'd let me do the same.
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I think you can also train spellcheckers -- when it's going through the check, if it catches 'colour' you can tell it 'add to dictionary' and it won't flag that word as incorrect anymore. (If you're using auto-replace, aaugh, turn that off. It's more trouble than it's worth.)
I'm using OpenOffice and it does let me use Canadian spellings successfully.
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I have trained my Firefox spellchecker extensively in culinary terms and fandom and gaming language, but it at least has a UK spelling add-on. (Interestingly this is the only add-on I have which, every time I update to a new version of Firefox, gets a message saying "You know you can get rid of this thing any gosh-darn time you like, don't y'all?" -- partly adding to my feeling of persecution.) Adding in every single word that Americans spell differently is an unacceptable solution when there are 17 different varieties of English built into the program as well as MANY other world languages, all of which it just refuses to contemplate using. I mean, what if I spoke Estonian and had to add every word in my language to a US English dictionary as a work-around?
I am contemplating something like OpenOffice. It's still made in the US, though, right? /paranoia
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Resident IT specialist has, after much research, fixed the problem by digging through myriad layers of nested folders to find the (hidden) read-only NORMAL file, turning the read-only lock off, deleting it and somehow recreating it again in a way that works. Computers: not intended for ordinary people.