Friday, September 9, 2016

Humor in uniform

It's the weekend--almost. So I was looking for something to fit in my Worth the Read category. Not opposed to a little humor in uniform, I came across a piece in the U. S. Naval Institute News, entitled, Officer in Charge of Sailors Captured By Iran Loses Appeal, Could Face Discharge. Some history of this contretemps can be found here and here.

But really I'm going to quibble with Microsoft and its failure to properly spell check a document before it gets published---an all too common problem in today's media and collapsed editing time frames.  Broadly, the development of computer spellcheck programs to assist writers is a good. For myself, I also use Grammarly for the tougher stuff.  Here's the reason you should not rely on spell-check---using the above article as an example.
failure to obey an order or regulation — of the Uniformed Code Military Justice (sic).
Yep, spell check didn't catch that.  Doing my own research I found that spellcheck was unlikely to catch the difference between Uniform Code of Military Justice, Uniformed Code of Military Justice, or Uninformed Code of Military Justice.  So I went back to the beginning of the article to test how accurate spellcheck really is and found an odd practice.  But then we have:
for violating Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
But then we go back to:
of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice
And, just to make it absolutely clear we have this three times in the same paragraph.  I have to admit that when I first read the word choices above I thought it said Uninformed Code of Military Justice; which is why I addressed the three alternate spellings in my testing.  On a final note, use of the auto-correct function does not seem to serve.

Next HIU should be on awarded punishments---huuuuum.

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