When you’re working with a computer it always helps to remember one of the corollaries to Gigo’s Law: “Never trust anything important to an automatic spellchecker.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with early computer age philosophers, let me give you a little history about Charles Babbage. He was born in 1792, died in 1871, and between those dates he did a lot of theoretical work on how machines could be used to perform mathematical operations. In many ways, he was the father of computing, and as far as I know he was the first person to state Gigo’s Law:
“On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
In the much more informal language of the 20th century, this would translate as “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”
So why am I bringing this up? Because in a document I was just sent, the author seems to have a great deal of confusion about when to use ‘there’, ‘their’, and ‘they’re’ and when I tried to point this out to them, they insisted that “The spellcheck said it was ok!”
They whir unconvinced until eye pointed out that yew could rite a sentence width words that maid know cents when red, butt witch wood pass inspection bye a computers spelling czhec.