15 Comments

1. 

   Clue: Telex

2. 

   Can’t think of a good clue, but in ROT-13

   abg irel tbbq ng fcryyvat jbeqf

3. 

   Cnat thenk uf won.

4. 

   “Poor Speller”

5. 

   madmup, Kilby was asking for a clue to the answer, not the answer itself.

6. 

   BD STDNT

7. 

   or D STDNT or LOW GPA

8. 

   I’m with Madmup. No shade on Phred, either you get it or you don’t, but others who do see it should not be asked to play the silly game of fine-tuning what is too much or too little of a “clue”. Just give the darn answer and let it go.

9. 

   and here I was trying to fit in a variation on “ mansplainer”

10. 

    Madmup — I got “pour” for the first word…

11. 

    I thought it was ‘Poor Spoiler’ but you’d need that to be on a honkin’ big gas guzzling Caddy for that.

12. 

    Having had trouble in school with seplling – I quickly figured the plate out.

    No really, I would write seplling in the heading of my test papers for spelling. However a really great teacher in sixth grade worked with me. I may not be sure how to spell a word, but I can generally figure out that I have spelled it wrong and can look up how to correctly spell it – and spell check is generally so much quicker and easier than using a dictionary used to be – what bothers me is how many words do not seem to be in the dictionary – or maybe I am making them up as I go?

13. 

    Meryl, spell check is okay as a first check, but at my old job the department head sent out a memo outlining a new procedure, and at the end he wrote: “Than you for you support.” Spell check said every word was correctly spelled. Absolutely correct yet completely useless. Like the helicopter outside of the Microsoft building.

14. 

    Chak: A woman who worked for me had a modal error of leaving “not” out of sentences. I eventually learned that when she said something that didn’t quite make sense, I should look for a place to insert a “not” and ask if that’s what she meant. It almost always was. Spellcheck or even AI are never going to catch THAT! Well, a truly sentient AI might some of the time, if it had access to the corpus of all her previous writings and could infer that she was contradicting a previous position–which is basically what I was doing.

    OTOH the number of people who still send things with errors that spellcheck must have flagged is depressing.

15. 

    Chak – Definitely true!

    I also find that some words for which I NEED the spell check – I cannot get what I am writing close enough to the word I mean, to get the spell check to correct it to what I want to say.