It makes out it’s better than you. It thinks it knows more than you know and will never pass up the opportunity to tell you exactly that. I am, of course, talking about the Microsoft Word Spell-check. Those little red and green lines that scribble underneath your copy and make you feel stupid. “How could I have been such a fool?” you ask yourself, as Word smugly informs you that your understanding of English grammar isn’t as hot as you’d hope it would be, a matter of weeks before you begin a creative writing MA. “How could I have been such an idiot?” you scream internally as you realise you’ve misused an apostrophe and that it was in fact the other version of the word “its” that required one. It brings you down. It knocks you about. It threatens physical violence on family members should you not give in to its whims.
For a moment you feel ashamed. Dirty. Wrong. But then you notice something….
The Microsoft Word Spell-check is insisting you put a question mark in after a sentence that is not a question.
Aha! It’s cracked! Its spell (get it?) has been broken! Why on earth would I want a question mark there, Microsoft Word? What sort of mad man would insist on turning a regular sentence into a question when it was at no point ever intended to be such a thing?
Gradually the preposterousness of the whole situation begins to sink in. If Word is wrong this time, maybe it’s been wrong all those times before? Maybe I’ve become so downbeat, so disheartened and so disillusioned from its constant put downs that I’ve grown to be reliant on it. Maybe now I take what it says for granted without checking things myself. Surely if Word, a beloved nation-wide computer programme created by Bill Gates (well, maybe not him personally, but I’m sure he’s used it) says something is correct, then it must be correct. Who am I, a mere published writer with a BA degree and a place on a creative writing MA course to disagree? I am a peasant. I am worthless in comparison. I feel too low to even look at the screen with Word present, to even share its desk space when it sits so much higher in the echelons of God’s earth than I do.
But not anymore, Word.
Not after this.
My grammar has just kicked yours in the face by knowing full well that I never wished for a question mark to appear after that sentence. You can disagree all you like, your green squiggle does not threaten me any more.
I am a better man.
A wiser man.
I am a man without questions, and no thanks to you, that is how I shall remain.