Jeff & Konnor's Blog

Heads up when using spellcheck if you happen to be writing a paper on the financial crisis. "Steagall," as in the Glass-Steagall Act, the 1933 law that separated investment banking from commercial banking, is not in the MSWord dictionary. However, MSWord is more than happy to correct it to "Smeagol," as in the tricksy character pictured here.

There is actually a term for using spellcheck to mistakenly change a word to something you didn't mean: Cupertino. It is so named because early spellcheck dictionaries contained only "co-operation" with a hyphen, so typing "cooperation" without the hyphen gave the suggested correction "Cupertino," a city in California.