As I've said here before, I never really like to think of myself as a sociologist. I'm not much for all the theory behind this business, and I cringe when I hear the names Castells or Giddens. Still, I do consider myself a bit of a pop-sociologist. I enjoy Malcom Gladwell and I like watching social movements develop and change.
Somehow, this interest translates into me noticing strange things from time to time. I was sitting bored at my internship today, trying to brainstorm where to head next with my now 34-pages-and-counting report, and I was typing random thoughts into the document I was looking at while waiting for my mental block to pass.
For some reason, I typed "jedi master yoda" into Word. Keep in mind that my language pack is currently set to "English (India)" to make my report Indian-English friendly (see Saturday's post).
As expected, Word put the little "You have misspelled this word" red line underneath "jedi" and "yoda." Out of curiosity, I right-clicked on them to see what options Word would recommend as suggested replacements. For both options, Word merely suggested that I capitalise the words so the resulting phrase would be "Jedi Master Yoda."
As far as I'm concerned, the implications of this are huge. I checked the OED, and neither "Jedi" or "Yoda" appear. That means that Microsoft has taken the license to add the pop-culture references that it deems are in wide enough use to justify inclusion in their dictionary.
It's cool, but worrisome at the same time. I am one of those partially-lazy students who has come to depend on spellchecker to pick up the words that I miss on my initial read-through. I don't make much of an effort of proofreading papers. Now I need to wonder if I've turned in a paper in the past that included a statement like: "He sat down at the counter and ordered two Cream Yodas." Disturbing.
Flown by mariposa at 12:58 PM on June 14, 2005
