Semantically Challenged

   There was a problem with the car breaking system.

   That appeared in a book published by the Oxford University Press titled "Information, A Very Short Introduction." It's a fine series of publications, coordinated by some of the best writers and editors in the world. However, it's an example of semantically challenged computers and editors relying too much on spell-check programs.
   Machines can be and are taught to catch mis-spelled words, but semantics and context are beyond their ken. Proofreading and editing still require the knowledge, skill and expertise of people, who can view a word in relation to others in a sentence.
   Clearly, the word wanted in the example above would refer to a car's "braking system." Both words are spelled correctly, but in relation to the rest of the sentence the example makes no sense, unless one is using a vehicle to destroy something.
   In addition, transposed letters can change the meaning of a word and destroy the sense of the phrase. And speech-to-type systems are not much better, since many words are pronounced the same but have entirely different meanings. Examples include do, due, dew; write, wright, right, rite; to, two, too; rain, rein, reign; and this editor's favorite example of a quadruple play,  carrot, carat, karat, caret.
   And transposed letters can yield martial instead of marital, although with some couples there is little practical difference.

   So by all means continue to use a spell-check program, but consider it a tool, not a preventive cure-all. It will only flag words it does not recognize, even if that word is correctly spelled. It may be an obscure word, or just one that programmers have not yet fed into the system. There are, after all, some half a million words in the English language, with more being invented or borrowed every day.

    And while we're preachifying (there's a word that spell-check will probably flag), disable the auto-correct function in your word processing system. At best, it can be a distraction and at worst it will be wrong, especially if you're writing a piece about mis-spelled words. If the machine automatically corrects all the mis-spellings, your piece makes no sense.

   By the way, the spell-check program on the computer used to write this piece flagged "wright" and "mis-spelled" as well as "preachifying."