Colour, commentary

An article in In Saturday's Toronto Star, in the Ideas section, caught my eye: "Canadese: Spellchecked into oblivion."

Four years ago, I addressed this problem of reliance on spell checkers and the issue of IT departments leaving the language default at US spelling in an article "Bad Language in the Workplace(or why Bill Gates Sux)". (Admittedly, the snarky comment in parenthesis was ill-conceived.)

The piece was included (with additional rant-like footnotes) in "a mixed bag of bones" [issue one, volume one] posted at Issuu.com.

In the post I complained,

"I looked around my world, and noticed a horrifying tendency. The strides we have made in establishing Canadian English are being reversed. And I think we can blame Bill Gates for this backslide.

For example, the book I was reading, about prairie life in Canada, written by a Saskatchewan-based writer and published by a Canadian imprint, was littered with American spelling and with its obligatory thanks to Canadian Council for the Arts for financial assistance, I wondered if the Council could reclaim its handouts from publishers unable to preserve our language.

If asked, these publishers would probably say they are catering to a global audience and that means using American spelling. It is more likely, however, that there are fewer editors with larger workloads working alongside proofreaders relying too heavily on spell-checkers. I wondered if most Canadians even recognize the difference.

The Star article addresses this issue of reliance on online dictionaries as a reason for "layoffs at Oxford's Canadian dictionary ...."

Indeed reliance on all things online is something I've recently learned about by working with 20-somethings who are surprised to learn the difference between a hyphen and an en-dash, i.e. and e.g., and the scientific reasons sans serif typeface works for online content, but not for printed matter.

It may seem odd to some, but I am the type of technical writer who brings her own dictionaries (and style guide reference books) to the workplace because in most firms, there's not a dictionary in sight.

My advice to the folks at Oxford is to target corporations.

Every department in every company ought to have at least one hard-bound dictionary.

Comments

[Andrea McCall]

Having an english degree, I completely understand. The other thing that gets to me is that they don't teach students the difference between creative writing and formal writing. When I proof read my sons' work, I am continually correcting slang. Grrrrr....