Friday, January 5, 2007

Non-standard word (consider revising)

Oh, Microsoft Word, how you are crazy. Let me count the ways...

Yeah, yeah, everyone's always ripping on Word and I'm usually just thinking "whatever, at least it's not a typewriter." But, it's finally my turn to complain.

I'm writing an abstract for a conference and I write this phrase (as part of a sentence...it comes after a semicolon):

He acts only as an arbitrator, thus acknowledging there is an authoritative power he cannot supercede.

Oooo, pretty...right? But wait, what's that there? There is a green squiggly line underneath the final word! I right click the word to see what is wrong as I just KNOW I spelled it correctly. And whaddya know? It's not a standard word, apparently.

Ummm, kay. Sure.... **backs away slowly**

Hey, pssst...the people who put together the Word grammar check are really stupid. I mean. I knew they were dumb, but that's pretty bad.



Edit: So, R informed me that even though many of us spell supercede with a "c", the dictionary has it with an s: supersede. That still doesn't explain why I didn't have a red squiggly line underneath the word (for a spelling mistake). Green squigglies are for grammar or formatting. So, I'm not as smart as I thought I was, but the Word people are still stupid. We all win!