Microsoft Office’s ‘Woke’ Spellchecker Is Perfectly Fine

Our company has antenna towers in rented locations throughout the US and other areas. The default "inclusivity" bot on Slack always flags "guys" and "guy wires."

We turned it off.

It seems quite possible it might end up offending, if people just start blithely adopting its suggestions in situations that aren't right to do so. A variation on the Scunthorpe problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

And while Microsoft did consult for regional variations here, as someone who speaks and writes non-American English, I am also reminded of all the red squiggles under words like "colour" when I use American software. Microsoft's definitions or ideas of what is offensive are not necessarily my culture's definitions or ideas of what is offensive. There's a certain amount of prescriptive dictation there (uncharitably, one might call it cultural imperialism).

The feature is turned off by default -- if you are conscientious you can turn it on, or if you have no worry of offending others, then leave it off. Whats the problem?

I do love when people argue against 'woke', missing the fact that the opposite implication of 'woke' is 'ignorant', like it or not. And lately its very popular to be aggressively ignorant; insult and injury just for the sake of insult and injury.