hackbash

There is, at least according to Bill Bryson, room for debate about the correct way to spell English words ending ise or ize. Most authorities favour ise in British English and ize for the American but, pedants beware, ize endings aren’t strictly wrong on this side of the Atlantic - they originated here.

But there are words that Americans simply spell wrongly, which is why it’s so irritating to see the English spellings underlined by Microsoft Word’s spellchecker.

The problem starts with whoever installs or first configures the computer. Windows has regional settings that tell it the format to use for dates, currency and so-on. Crucially, they’re also used to localise the programs you subsequently install, most notably those that - like office suites - handle text. If whoever installs Windows doesn’t bother to localise it properly (and if you don’t do it yourself - see below), Word and the other apps will be configured with a US English dictionary.

I used to set up machines for a living - it’s lazy to not bother correcting their localisation. I’m hereby submitting a new support incident to every single helpdesk in the UK, asking that you each please make your monkeys set up computers for the correct country.

Thank you. If you need to update me, please send tickets to ‘reiterativeprocessmaturitymodel@hackbash.com’*

Wordplay

Now I write and edit for a living, praise be, it winds me up to receive documents where correctly-spelled words are queried. This is an(other) annoying feature of Word’s: even if your machine is set up correctly, documents are displayed with the language settings used by their author. If they’re written with a US English dictionary, you’ll need to select the entire text and manually set the language to British English before you’re editing them with the right dictionary. Even then, as I recently discovered, footnotes still need to be localised separately from the body copy.

On one level it’s simply an irritation. On another, given the prevalence of Word, I wonder if it’s also a bit more significant. If everyone’s writing with a US English dictionary, perhaps everyone will start using American spelling.

Then again, given the ubiquity of the internet and the amount of written English shared on it, that’s probably going to happen anyway. For how long will it matter?

Correcting your PC’s localisation

No professional writer should be creating wrongly-localised documents.

You can check your PC’s localisation by clicking the Start button, clicking Settings and then Control Panel. Double-click the Regional and Language Options icon. You’ll see a different applet depending whether you have XP or Vista, but you should work your way through all the tabs making sure that the British English options are selected, and that you click Apply each time before you change between tabs.

Next you’ll need to sort Word out. In Word 2003, select Language from the Tools menu and click Set Language. Make sure English (U.K.) is selected and click the Default… button. It’s much the same in Word 2007, but you get to the Set Language option on the ribbon’s Review tab.

*this is a private joke. If you want me to explain it, please send a self-addressed envelope.

Tags: localisation, Microsoft, spellchecker, technical support, Word