Dictionary mistakes

[mid_life_crisis]

To the best of my knowledge, there are no words in the English language that
include a single quote, yet the Word dictionary is full of them. Whoever did
the data entry did not know the difference between an apostrophe and a single
quote. There are too many to make a list. Please release a dictionary
update with these corrected. Given that humans are creating the dictionary,
it will always have mistakes. Please make it possible to open the dictionary
and edit. I would correct this myself if I could search and replace single
quotes with apostrophes.

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[grammatim]

Are you too young to remember typewriters? There was no such thing as
curly quotes in the olden days, and there are many computer fonts to
this day that do not include the curly quote characters.

If your spellchecker is telling you that contractions containing an
apostrophe are mistakes, then there's something very wrong with your
computer, because Word is perfectly aware that they are
interchangeable, and you can in fact convert straight quotes to curly
quotes by running a single search with ' in the Find What? box and '
in the Replace With box, and then a single search with " in the Find
What? box and " in the Replace With box (so long as "Use Curly Quotes"
is checked in your Options).

 

[JohnExcel]

Are you too young to remember typewriters? There was no such thing as
curly quotes in the olden days, and there are many computer fonts to
this day that do not include the curly quote characters.

If your spellchecker is telling you that contractions containing an
apostrophe are mistakes, then there's something very wrong with your
computer, because Word is perfectly aware that they are
interchangeable, and you can in fact convert straight quotes to curly
quotes by running a single search with ' in the Find What? box and '
in the Replace With box, and then a single search with " in the Find
What? box and " in the Replace With box (so long as "Use Curly Quotes"
is checked in your Options).

OK, I partly understand what this writer is trying to say.
But, you know, it is difficult to focus on his/her core message, through the
anger-tone of his/her text. "Are you too young to remember typewriters?",
"...very wrong...", "...perfectly aware...", and other adverb-laden phrases
are not tasteful in any forum, in my opinion. Angry person, you're getting
me angry.
Even so, perhaps I am reading a solution to my problem, in his post. My
problem is that the spell checker insists that "won't" and "don't" are
misspelled, even when I manually add them to CUSTOM.DIC.
To clarify my question, do I now have to alter my Options in Office 2003
apps in some way? How do I do that? (I just looked at Options in Word 2003,
and I didn't find anything to alter regarding curly quotes or curly marks or
apostrophes.) Or, do I have to to a Search and Replace, each time I write a
document that might contain these or some other contractions, to change the
symbol to a symbol that was programmed into the spell checker utility?
Was this issue resolved in Office 2007, and now MS doesn't want to resolve
it in the "legacy" product?
Thanks very much.

 

[Gordon Bentley-Mix]

John,

You're not the first to take exception to Peter's "unfailingly polite" tone,
and I'm sure you won't be the last...

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

Well, that certainly answered his question about what's going wrong
with his spellcheck!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm guessing that the document was originally created in WordPerfect. If so,
the things that look like apostrophes in "won't" and "don't" are very likely
characters from the WP Typographic Symbols font, and consequently Word
doesn't recognize them as apostrophes. If you delete the existing apostrophe
and insert a new one (which Word will AutoFormat), does Word still mark the
word as misspelled?

Another possibility: Are the contractions actually being marked as
misspelled (wavy red underline) or as grammar errors (wavy green underline)?
If you have "Check grammar as you type" enabled and have checked
"Contractions" under Style in the grammar settings, then these will be
marked as errors.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Gordon Bentley-Mix]

And your response is soooo much more helpful...

See there's the difference between us: I don't know what's wrong with his
spellcheck, so I didn't try to answer the question. I just offered a bit of
moral support instead. Sometimes people like to know that they're not alone
in the way they feel about things - especially when the feeling is
"offended".