[pmmail-list] Spell Check Dictionary

[Gary DiPillo]

Tim,

I have seen similar names in Usenet news groups; it seems to be popular
among some netizens.

I don't consider your comments a trivialization of the issue.  There is
plenty of room for free speech and PC speech, even if it sometimes
seems foolish to me.  The "master/slave" controversy is an example of
both.

We don't spell check incoming mail, and since I know my people well, I
don't feel the need to censor their outgoing mail.  I know, from their
experiences with the spell checker, that accidents can happen, and I
don't see why I should tolerate racial and ethnic slurs being
introduced into e-mails where it was never intended to be.

I have found, through very brief experimentation (I removed just one of
the words from the list), that the spell checker starts failing to
recognize some very simple words that it had previously handled
correctly, which is why I am hoping to find someone here who knows how
to alter the dictionaries properly.

Gary


On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 10:17:34 -0800, Tim Roberts wrote:

>Gary DiPillo wrote:
>
>>I support the PMMail clients for my company.
>>
>>We recently found that there are a number of words in the spell check
>>dictionary which we find offensive.  I don't expect any of my employees
>>to use these words, but I would like to remove these words from the
>>dictionary so that a) they do not inadvertantly let a misspelling or
>>typo that results in one of these words through without an opportunity
>>for correction, and b) so that they are not offered as a suggested
>>correction to a word which is inadvertently accepted by the user in
>>haste.
>>
>>A real example:  One of my users was writing to a business contact
>>whose name is Kevin.  Kevin is not in her dictionary, so the spell
>>checker offered "kike" as its first suggestion.
>>  
>>
>
>Without meaning to trivialize this at all, this reminds me of a couple 
>of things.
>
>I recently tried to acquire a personalized domain for myself (Harris's 
>Lament: All The Good Ones Are Taken).  GoDaddy.com has a feature where 
>it will suggest alternative domain names when the one you want is 
>taken.  When tim-roberts.com was taken, it actually included 
>"tim-roberts-is-an-asshole.com" among its suggestions.  I suspect this 
>is some kind of automated pattern recognition gone awry, but it ticked 
>me off.
>
>The purchasing manager in the City of Los Angeles a recently decreed 
>that, due to an employee complaint, it will no longer buy any computer 
>peripherals which include the labels "master" and "slave".  It's going 
>to be tough for them to buy any IDE disk drives.
>
>-- 
>- Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
>  Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>
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