Friday, February 17, 2006

Spill cheque?

The glorious age of the modern computer has brought many wonderful things to our lives, not the least of which is word processing. This tool can take a functionally illiterate person and make them sound erudite. It cam also make some hilarious changes in the meaning and intent of the sentences that they correct. For example, “her parents are deceased” ,can easily become, “Her parents are diseased”. Thus a few letters can change her parents from being dead to being hemophiliac lepers. Imagine that error on a first date probably would end any chance of second date. Or perhaps,” he is easily distracted,” can become, “he is easily destructed”. Talk about your feet of clay. Or a rich man can go from being the “owner of a paper” to being the “owner of a pauper”. He would probably fall from good social standing at that. Then a traffic cop could go from” having a whistle in his mouth” to “having a thistle in his mouth”. In the case of the latter I would not want to run any red lights in his vicinity. It would be a gruesome thing indeed to not be “plagued by the raspy coughing of a coworker” to “plague by the raspy coffin of a coworker.” And who would not be worried that his girlfriend “stood on the edge of the precipice and viewed the expansive waste below” if he read that she “stood on the edge of the precipice and viewed the expansive waist below” definitely would be time to look into a weight loss program fro someone.
For all the wonderful things computer bring to our lives they also take something away. That something often is just exactly what we meant to say.

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