Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language
bbc.com
bbc.com
I want to use the words in my head, not the ones in the machine. At least until recently it's not been up to par.
Font has been translated as "czcionka", which in Polish originally meant sort (a metal block for a single letter).
Cancel has been translated as "anuluj" (to revoke, abolish).
This happened at the time when computers have exploded in popularity in Poland, and the terms have been assimilated along with all other computer jargon. Later attempts to correct the translations ("krój pisma", "poniechaj") have failed due to sounding like a pedantic deviation from an already established terminology. So Polish message boxes have [OK] and [Abolish] buttons.
I'm pretty confident that Word played a significant role in "E-Mail" becoming the canonically accepted German spelling.
Ironically it hasn’t gotten much better in those 30 years since I first started using it. The new features have broken core features, and performance has gone backwards.
It is the perfect example of feature creep and over engineering that ultimately worsens usability. If I had enough vintage pcs I would do a 40 year analysis to answer why it’s gotten so much worse.
Ive been using word since 1991. I recently started a new job, got a fancy HP laptop, and I swear word ran faster on my 386SX than it does on this i9. Turn on “all markup” after a few people have edited it, and there’s a 2 second delay between keystrokes.
Almost all spell checkers will split these examples so it's really changing our language. I have considered filing a bug with Apple because I mostly notice it on my iPhone. Perhaps it's already to late, wrong space use is very pervasive nowadays.
But the OP article briefly raises an interesting point by way of linking to and quoting https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171308 :
> Analysis of the screen recording data revealed that students were more apt to make microstructural rather than macrostructural changes to their work and that they continuously revised at all stages of their writing.
The idea that we can easily make non-append-only changes to our text simply by moving a mouse or trackpad may very well change how we think about language.
A less severe version, perhaps, of the phenomenon in the movie Arrival and Ted Chiang's novella Story of Your Life (highly worth a read, and easily accessible with a quick search), where learning an alien language changes a person's entire outlook on - well, to minimize spoilers, every aspect of how life is lived.
Perhaps, insofar as I typed the word "perhaps" after I wrote the rest of the forthcoming sentence... we already live in a world where something like this has transpired.
Forgot about WordStar?
> WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and textual WYSIWYG.
They produced a bunch of different versions, and that screenshot is for an MS-DOS version.
[1]: Where the student forgot to delete the citation footnotes.
[2]: Or, if they're really not paying attention, maybe even a wild [citation needed].
Sounds like it's working fine to me.
Joking aside, this is a great article with many strong points, but disabling or mitigating spellcheck is always a possibility. I usually disable it since many of the grammar suggestions Word provides are questionable.
In a workplace setting when consistency is key, it seems like grammar and spellcheck are essential utilities.
Similarly my frustration with Office is that depending on how you access it (web version, office 365, within Teams, etc), it's been my experience that the configuration/preferences are not carried over so it's just very annoying to know that despite Office365 being so connected, depending on how I use Office365 my preferences aren't carried over.
I would vastly prefer if spellchecks and auto-corrects were more restrained in what they tried to fix. A lot of the grammar changes are inane typically or treating stylistic choices as grammar mistakes. Probably Office just isn't for me but I think it changes the writing enough in many cases that the meaning is lost.
It still makes me do mental arithmetic when someone gives post 2000 as a birthdate. Shit, my nephew was born post 2010 and he’s twelve which is weird because 2010 was like, three years ago.
These days I find thesauruses a great aid to more precisely describe what I'm trying to convey, or help me find that word that's on the tip of my tongue.
I'd say the article missed the mark by focusing on features, especially spellcheck/autocorrect.
It's like some sort of cognitive blindness: I mean, the article has a photo with typists at the office and yet it competely ignores the transformation that an engine/platform – a computer – with a tool – a word processor – had on the way language is used in business, leisure, creative and, of course, language work (anything from print or editing to business memos).
A hammer can have a flavor, but it's still a hammer. This article focuses on the objectionable and weak flavor of MS Word while ignoring the wider implications of a digital word processor.
To this day, using Word involves tricking Word into doing what you want. You get better at this over time.
Word has always been a ubiquitous, necessary evil.
Maybe MS Word is just changing things so fast that we are able to notice it, but the languages we use and the ways we comunicate have changed over time and will keep changing.
I notice a huge stylistic difference in articles written today compared to twenty years ago. There seemed to be much more variety and colorful language. Today, the trend is concise, simple sentences.
As if American movies, music, and TV weren't already a major export when Gates was practically still in diapers.
Word standardizes text through:
- Document templates
- English as lingua franca
- Auto correct and completion
Whether or not you agree (I personally do not find it convincing) it up to you, but there’s a summary because the article is very long-winded.
I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more.
Examples include bad dictionaries in other languages. Bad or no translations. And for instance in Norwegian we quote things like «ord» or „ord“, but all software I use do or makes it harder than just doing "ord". US systems assumes all addresses uses zip codes. My name contains a letter not in ascii, breaking lots of systems. I can't use vpn at work if I'm in a city with the letter Ø in it as some go proxy geoip location thingy crashes. ChatGPT can output in my language, but the language is stiff and feels off. If I ask it to rhyme, it doesn't but if I were to translate back to English it rhymes. Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when.
Or how things are moderated to an US standard. In Scandinavia boobs are fine, and in Danish newspapers you'd see them all the time. With global networks, we're now moderating to American "prudeness".
I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized. Word uses quotes ok and grammar is not terrible. Except it for decades have insisted on writing internet with a capital I for some reason, which we don't do.
> Or how things are moderated to an US standard
It's just comical how adults on Youtube talking about adult topics are pressured into censoring even mild profanity
And of course a long slide from any sort of meaningful enforcement on monopolies and cartels, once in the American market, and now largely in the international sphere.
Finally, Microsoft Office itself is an information prison. The information is locked in proprietary and defensively changed file formats that either require more Microsoft "products" to access the information meaningfully, or decades of reverse engineering.
And keep in mind that 90% of the data in office documents is just ... text.
Anyway, Happy Microsoft Word day apparently.
That's mostly due to TikTok which is even worse than Youtube in its opacity and complete unaccountability to anyone.
IMHO this app is controlled by the Chinese government to a degree that it is intentional that kids can't talk about stuff like sexuality (which has to be censor-named to "seggsual") or suicide ("unaliving") using proper words - sort of like 1984.
What is different now is that we are getting contact with it. While in the past the Orwellian features were kept inside borders both for propaganda effect and because nobody outside of them would willingly adopt the practice.
This may come as a shock to people here, but European countries have their own censorship in their own for adults political programs and TV. This idea that it is somehow unique to censor swearing is really weird.
It feels like the US is overstretching its own diversity.
Maybe it’s just as bad some places in Europe, and it just doesn’t get televised.
Something about this line is bothering me.
In the US, we're very diverse sure, but also that diversity comes with deep history of violence, struggle, systemic oppression, etc.
To many, current movements might come off like they're overstepping, but so much about our culture is so deeply steeped in the opposite. So much of our daily life has been structured around old deeply racist systems and as a population we're struggling to come to terms with the contradictions of concepts we were taught with the reality. We're taught we're a melting pot of cultures, yet there are so many atrocities in living memory that parts of the population wish would be simply forgotten.
So there is the counter swing of the "woke"(I hate that word and the complete corruption of the concept), which is an attempt to bring these subconscious ideas into the conscious level so we can think about them and confront them, rather than let them continue to simmer.
The overarching goal isn't to make all these things the standard, but to overshoot so that when the cultural tendon relaxes, it falls to a better place.
The "Woke" movements is an attempt to fight a cultural virus, and the remnants of the virus does not like it and gets defensive, and informs other parts of the body that this medicine is actually a virus in of itself. The goal isn't that the medicine becomes a permanent fixture, but that it brings to light the virus and allows the society to understand how to extinguish it.
The problem isn’t the deep history of discrimination. I consider that something that created a lot of growth.
The problem is discrimination is natural and it is only fought with diversity but there is no such place that is truly diverse.
I live in, by world standards, a diverse part of the LA metro area. Except there’s like no Black people. Now if I go to a more Black-dominated part of LA, there might not be Koreans. Now if I take the entirety of LA, it will have both Black people and Koreans and maybe you could call it diverse? Except there will be very few Nigerians or Kazakhstanis.
The issue is that I cannot speak for Nigerians or Kazakhstanis however hard I try. It’s like an electrician who just read some books but has never worked with an actual electrician. My attempts to accommodate a group of people I don’t know will be completely fake. They will know I don’t know a single Nigerian or Kazakhstani.
So when people try to be woke, it usually comes from that level of inexperience. It’s not real diversity. It’s that electrician trying their best but doing it all wrong.
> The issue is that I cannot speak for Nigerians or Kazakhstanis however hard I try.
Yup. You demonstrate an awareness, a conscientiousness, that's too rare.
I've been in gatherings (eg board meetings) where someone will presume to speak on behalf of others. While one of those others is sitting right there, trying to be heard.
Not helpful.
And super awkward.
Which reminds me... That All Gas No Breaks guy did a terrific segment about those "antifa" & "BLM" protests in Portland Oregon. Standard in person interviews with a bunch of bored white kids just looking for a fight.
Then the genius bit: No Breaks sought out blacks and asked them about the protests. He just let's them talk, in that great way that he does.
Punchline: the blacks interviewed stated the belligerents a) were missing the point (to listen to black people) and b) were making it that much harder for blacks to be heard.
Typical.
In the social media massively distributed bullhorn industry, these issues are used to create a distracting perma-debate that both parties can employ and divide for their needed political support. But notice that the debates never center on the most important diversity issue: the fact that the rich have almost all the money, is squeezing everyone, and the squeezing appears as fissures along racial and ethnic lines.
Basically, non-whites basically are saying "hey we need money and investment from white people". Which is true! 99% of nonwhite communities need massive investment.
But white people say "we don't have any money". Which is true! Because the white middle class is gone, the upper middle class is now being hollowed out, and generational warfare has left most young "upper class" white people as well as the once-middle-class whites completely laden with loans. So 90% of whites don't have money, and THEY need investment.
So where's the money? Oh ... right.
Obviously not true. The government has almost all the money. When it needs more, it just prints off a few trillion as necessary.
As for the rich, they by and large created the wealth they have. When you invest money in an enterprise that is productive, you're creating wealth.
As someone old enough that I could be a parent of youngish EU citizen, I too watched a lot of US cartoons and movies as a kid.
Though regarding the quotation marks, that seems to be more the fault of the local keyboard layouts. I don't understand why German keyboards don't have the keys to write „ord“. MS Word relies on a software solution to automatically convert "ord" into the German format, but most software (like browsers) understandably don't bother with implementing such replacements. The same thing applies to ' and ’. (Is this even the character I have in mind?)
Regarding ChatGPT being bad at Norwegian: That's excusable, as the performance of the model is dependent on the amount of available training data.
American prudishness. Yeah. Every country has its own preferences, but among Western countries, the US seems special with their aversion to nudity. Excluding Australia perhaps. In the US violence is okay but nudity isn't, in Germany violence isn't okay but nudity is, in France both are okay. The US has a stronger aversion to nudity than most European countries, but it's interesting that in the US a sex scene without nudity appears to be less offensive than a nude scene without sex. As a German, that always seemed absurd to me, and presumably most Europeans would agree. But in the end it means that, because Google is an American company, YouTube globally allows no nudity (not even boobs), while being completely fine with strong violence and even gore.
Regarding am/pm, yeah, that sometimes still trips me up. According to Wikipedia:
> Other than in English-speaking countries and some Spanish-speaking countries, the terms a.m. and p.m. are seldom used and often unknown.
Australian here. Culturally we seem less comfortable with nudity than a lot of parts of Europe, but we’re not as bad as the US. It boils my blood how much online spaces (like Facebook) are moderated according to American standards.
Most software I use also can’t handle the fact that I mix American and Australian English spelling. (Programming always uses American spelling but I’ll use Australian spelling in other contexts.) All of my devices either complain about “color” or “colour”, and I’m constantly being told off or autocorrected for using my own language in a nuanced way.
I'm assuming for the same reason American/English keyboards don't have the keys to write “place”, just "place". Which is because American/English typewriters didn't -- they invented straight quotes to save extra keys. And looking up on Google Images, it looks like German typewriters were the same -- Shift+2 was a straight double quote.
It's my personal opinion that this was the original sin -- that typewriters implemented straight quotes rather than curly quotes, to save an extra column of keys. Imagine there's a parallel universe out there, just like ours, except straight quotes were never invented, and everybody actually types opening and closing quotes explicitly, and word processors never had to invent any "smart quotes" feature at all...
Still, I'm more surprised by German typewriters than English ones. In English, you can "get away" with straight quotes, they don't stick out too badly. But in German, the opening quote is in the totally wrong position, at the top instead of the bottom!
If the straight quote hadn't been invented, the influence in programming languages would have been interesting. Then presumably there would be no common quotation mark present on all keyboards. So perhaps programming languages would have used various kinds of brackets only. Straight quotes aren't great anyway for most things, as they can't really be nested unambiguously.
Now you know.
In hindsight the underscore and backslash been useful in computing, so I'd say we'd have done better to use the tilde and backtick slots for completing pairs of curly quotes instead! Of course, hindsight being 20/20 and all that...
LF was used a lot for glass editors connected at low baud rates.
I did not know that. The terms are from the Latin ante meridiem and post meridiem (meridiem, midday, ante before, post after) so it seemed logical to me that any Romance language would have them. But then, English is not a Romance language (but borrowed heavily from them) so, chalk another one up to English being an absolute mess.
Mittag = noon Vor = before -> "beforenoon" (literal translation of Vormittag) Nach = after -> "afternoon" (literal translation of Nachmittag)
But "vormittag" just translates to "morning" (with deepL and google translate).
Though there seems to exist "forenoon".
Don't worry; I'll forgive your insolence this time.
Actually didn't know about the quote thing though, even though I've loved here my whole life
It would be a net positive if Google's advertising business was broken up along regional lines for anti-competitive practices and also being anti-cultural. Anybody want to suggest it to the EU?
Yeah, I think America has pretty liberal standards.
My impression of the place is you have a modern industrial society replacing large parts of the preexisting feudal culture. Important, Japanese feudal culture is not the same as western Europe feudal culture. More face culture, less shame culture. And Japanese aren't as much prudish, as conservative and obsessed with decorum.
My favorite are medical tiktokers sharing gynecological information talking about vajujus and peepees so the algorithm doesn’t punish them for foul language.
And City Skylines inherited a lot of that legacy, that designs centered around mass transit and cycling (such as one would find in Europe or Japan) really only become fully practical with a bunch of mods installed.
Novel approaches to urban planning seems like an obvious thing to put in to urban planning games. What a missed opportunity.
(German) die Banditin -> (Spanish) el bandido
(Spanish) la bandida -> (German) der Bandit
So it always turns a female bandit into a male one.
https://blog.research.google/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-w...
But I just tested some end-to-end translations of some random simple sentences from German and Spanish Wikipedia. The translations are identical whether I translate them directly or via English as an intermediate step. This didn’t prove that Google Translate is using English (or some other interlingua), but at least demonstrates doesn’t not use one. :)
German example:
de = Wikipedia ist ein Projekt zum Aufbau einer Enzyklopädie aus freien Inhalten.
de:en = Wikipedia is a project to build an encyclopedia of free content.
en:es = Wikipedia es un proyecto para construir una enciclopedia de contenido gratuito.
de:es = Wikipedia es un proyecto para construir una enciclopedia de contenido gratuito.
Spanish example:
es = Wikipedia es una enciclopedia libre, políglota y editada de manera colaborativa.
es:en = Wikipedia is a free, polyglot and collaboratively edited encyclopedia.
en:de = Wikipedia ist eine freie, polyglotte und gemeinschaftlich bearbeitete Enzyklopädie.
es:de = Wikipedia ist eine freie, polyglotte und gemeinschaftlich bearbeitete Enzyklopädie.
I am not sure but I think I heard Google Translate always goes via English.
That's my understanding, yes.
[0] Also British, Canadian & Australian software, but with few exceptions (Shopify, Atlassian…) few of these have such global presumptions as US software products.
Poor old John Smith Ⅳ (pronounced “John Smith the Fourth”) probably gets turned into the initials “JI” (because let’s be real, he actually wrote “IV” rather than “Ⅳ”).
I think a single field for the entire name would be ideal, with an optional second field for "how should we address you?" so that the software doesn't have to play games with asking gender and breaking out the last name to fill out a form letter with "Dear Mr. Smith, ..."
I consulted on a project for a US-based airline. The horror show that is Sabre infests everything, and Sabre doesn't understand any character that didn't exist in six-bit BCD
So what are they?
To use another example, a binary tree is not an array, although it can be implemented using an array.
Money is not a floating point value, and woe to the programmer that tries to use float for money.
We have i18n to give context, no assumptions needed.
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Tell me about it. In my native language (European) we have accents at the end of some words (like città or pubblicità; city and advertisement respectively).
As someone that works with typography in someway or another, I can't count how many times I had a font that didn't support the character à or é or whatever and I had to choose a font that looks similar to the one I want but that if you look at the text for even a few moments more, you are guaranteed to notice it.
An even more disappointing fact is how many people use the apostrophe instead of the accent for capitalized letters (E' instead of É) because there no É button on the keyboard. Shift+è brings up é
> Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when.
I have a similar problem. Sometimes someone writes a date in the American MM/DD/YYYY format instead of the DD/MM/YYYY one and unless it's something like 08/24/2023 where there is no month 24, it can be pretty disorienting to me. That's why I really like the ISO (please fill me up on the number) YYYY-MM-DD: it's both clearly distinct for the other two and standardized across the world
> I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized
100% agree with you, although there are some other production that do a pretty good job (both FOSS like Jellyfin and commercial like Affinity Photo). Fun fact: Microsoft Word 2007's dictionary doesn't have the surnames of some of my classmates but has mine (which is something so rare it's basically impossible)
8601
https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html
Speaking of dates, if you live in the US did you remember to move your clocks back an hour last night? If you live in Europe, it's next week.
On a Mac it’s easy. Just hold down the letter and you will have options for pretty much any accent. Holding Capital E for example on iOS: Ë É E È Ê Ě Ę etc..
> on iOS
I think this works for any mobile keyboard (for example, AOSP's default keyboard supports that). In my language at least, the use of a capital letter with an accent is pretty rare, especially when we're talking about quick messages (which is what your most likely to write on mobile)
The automated suggestions are still so poor and out of touch with reality, I reckon they will only be useful to dyslexics who are throwing dice anyways.
When is dinner?
- It's at seven.
When does the flight depart?
- At 19:00
No, we don't. The only person I know who by default uses 12h is my grandmother. Everybody else always uses 24h.
All my experience has also been using 12h time in casual situations in 24h countries. I'm curious of a country that doesn't, and whether that's true of the whole region.
[0] [12:00 PM, 12:00 AM) for after the noon instant
[1] [12:00 AM, 12:00 PM) for before the noon instant
24-hour time is superior to the mod-12 time system in almost every way but mechanical clock faces and soldier shifts under early systems that used sun dials. However, the equivalent question can be asked by a day is a clopen interval of [00:00 current day, 00:00 next day)
A place open 24 hours/day is open in the period 0-24.
I think you get the essential utility you want in a 24 hour clock by simply letting 24 (or "24:00:00" when fully written out) be a way to represent the end of the day.
It's also already in use, with examples at https://ioi2023.hu/faq/ , http://www.garageferrarimilazzo.com/en/ , and https://jozsefvaros.hu/english/news-in-the-district/2022/12/... .
It can obviously be learned, but it's something lots of people have trouble with. I was probably in my teens before I finally got that memorized enough to keep them straight. Lots of things happen at 11:59 PM (due dates being the most prominent example) because it's less potentially ambiguous than 12:00 AM the next day, even though it's functionally the same thing.
Noon is also not "12:00" - it is the infinitely small moment at the strike of 12:00. Instantaneously it becomes post-meridiem. 12:00:00.0000000000000000000000000000001 is after noon.
I do enjoy though where systems have to deal with 'weird' days. I believe in the UK the rail ticketing system works on essentially a 26h day - that is to say if you buy a ticket at on 5th November, it will be valid until 04:00 on 6th November, so in some sense the hours 00:00-04:00 belong to both days.
Trying to find the source again but not having success.
Bias. Most people can. I'm in the UK, too.
You're right that by convention noon is assigned a pm tag and midnight is assigned an am tag. But midnight, when the calendar date changes, is confusing enough to people that e.g. airplane departures will be scheduled for 11:59 pm rather than 12:00 am, because there's no ambiguity about when 11:59 pm will happen on Wednesday, whereas it isn't clear when midnight will happen on Wednesday -- technically, if it's Wednesday, midnight already happened on Tuesday night.
It is far more common for people to end their personal day after midnight than it is to begin it before midnight, so the convention directly contradicts the way pretty much everyone views "the day".
I personally enjoy using 24-hour clocks on all devices I can.
Use of either mechanical displays or on computers time selecter widgets does mean that 24 is not shown anywhere,
Not just languages. In my area we run into constant issues with MS products using American date/time formats in places it isn't wanted. For half of ever month this is a big deal, even inside the US as many organizations use the international standard. People cut-and-paste from popup windows or error logs only to discover that the tiny bit of MS code that generated the notice doesn't respect realworld date formats (day-month-year) and just defaults to the US format (month-day-year). Non-MS software (apple/google) and open source more often than not respect date formats. It is MS that seems to just not care.
I was once involved in a heated debate re a contract when everyone suddenly realized the issue: 05/06/18 had been confused with 06/05/18, resulting in an extra month of costs being attached. I think to avoid further ambiguity I jokingly rewrote it as "On the sixth day of the fifth month of the year of our lord two thousands and eighteen and ..."
This is a plus, not a minus. It doesn't matter what (reasonable) standard we go with, as long we go with one. I'm excited for a time when all humans speak (and read, if reading is still needed by then) the same easy-to-learn logical language from childhood.
When English and Norwegian become special interest topics that niche scholars learn as part of their grad work, we'll all be better off.
But I think that’s a good thing. Other people feel differently and want to preserve small patches of “pure” cultures, but I think the world is better and richer when hugely diverse cultures are diffused widely.
We're moderating things to the most influential country that uses that language. If you don't use English then you'll see tons of content that would not fly in the English internet. Searching for "watch rick and morty free" gets you to paid services and malware sites, while searching for that same show in a less popular language gets you a very fast pirated stream with subtitles in that language as the first search result. This is very useful for watching pirated English content as long as you don't mind the foreign subtitles.
I'm Spanish and I'm tired of American companies pretending only Mexican Spanish exists.
> "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Word in professional and technical fields has led to the borrowing of English terms and structures, which contribute to the trend of linguistic homogenisation."
Uh, what? Microsoft Word is available in dozens of languages, with spell checking available. I was able to find a copy of Word 3.0 (1986) in German on a certain well-known old-software site. If you tell modern Word your text is in German, it will underline non-English words, and if you tell it your text is in British English, it will probably complain about your mention of your "favorite color".
Heck, half of English nouns are taken from French, from when the French conquered England.
(from TFA)