An open letter to my archnemesis

Meghan Lange saint mary’s news e ditor

You hear the term “archenemies” and you think of some big rivalry between good and evil, maybe b atman vs. Joker or s herlock h olmes vs. Professor m oriarity.

b ut now I also want you to think: m eghan Lange vs. spell-check.

This may seem melodramatic, but let me just tell you how this supposedly helpful tool has come to ruin my life. I never thought I would have an archenemy. A rival? s ure. An opponent? o f course. b ut an archenemy?

c ome on, we’re not living in a movie or a comic book.

b ut no, I was wrong. s pell-check will now and forever, always be the bane of my existence.

Just last week, I was texting a friend and it changed the word “sec” into “sex.” n ow you can say: “ m eg it only changed one letter. It’s an honest mistake. Quit whining.” e ven when you want to use spell-check, it doesn’t know what you’re trying to say. n ow, I’m not the best speller. You can ask any of my kindergarten through eighth grade teachers to confirm. (Yes, eighth grade. Thank you Archdiocese of c hicago for requiring all eighth graders in the c atholic school system to have vocabulary tests.) I never won any awards or even got many 100 on my spelling tests. s o, when I’m writing a paper or even a text now, I sometimes need a little help from this all-knowing, light-up screen currently sitting on my lap called a m acbook when I’m trying to type out a word from my extensive college vocabulary. b ut more often than not, it has no idea what I’m saying.

I ask you, WTF! What if that had been to someone less understanding?

I’ll grant you that this column is one giant rant and is all about complaining, but then again, you don’t have to read it.

I digress, this is not the first time I’ve been grammatically screwed over by spell check, and I highly doubt it will be the last. I’m just simply done with spell-check. It’s just a pain in the butt and never actually helpful.

Again you interject, “ m aybe that’s because you spelled it so wrong that the algorithm can’t recognize it.” e xcuse me, sir, I think I know how to spell my own name, I’ve been perfecting this spelling for 22 years now.

To that, I say, “Its job is to recognize it.” h ow come when I know what I’m trying to say, spell check doesn’t understand and wants to change it, but when I don’t know the correct way to spell or say something, it doesn’t either?

And don’t even get me started on the names. m y name is spelled m eghan Lange, not m egan or m egyn or m aygan. It’s not that hard.

In the grand scheme of things, my name is pretty simple to spell. Yet, every time I type out my name, it says I’m wrong.

I can’t even imagine the trouble and frustration people with more than two syllables in their names have to deal with.

In conclusion, spell-check has it out for me, and it can go screw itself. (And I meant sec!)

Contact Meghan at mlange03@saintmarys.edu.

The views expressed in this Inside column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.