Gogle Did you mean: Google?
: A Google trick:
I find that I now use Google as my spellchecker. If I’m doing anything outside of Word — that is, if I’m posting here — and I run across a word of unsure spelling (which happens more and more now, thanks to [1] reliance on the Word automatic spellchecker and [2] age), I just put it in the Google search bar and, sure enough, wise old Google asks: “Did you mean…?”
: And in the comments come these two wonderful posts relating to our smart Google:
I was just reading about Jerome (of Vulgate fame), who was a “scholar” as well as later a translator, and I thought how we’ve come almost full circle with Google. In his day (350 AD), there weren’t books or even handly libraries, so if you wanted to “look something up” to verify accuracy, you hired a smart person. If you were rich enough, you hired one all to yourself. Then libraries made access to fact-checking more available to the common folk. Then every home (almost) had a dictionary and encyclopedia of their own — an ‘in-house’ library for checking facts. Then, broad-band access to an electronic, distributed library. And, finally, a smart person all my own: Google. I go to it for the simplest question. We have a number of CD-based encyclopedias (and hard-copy Encyclopedia Brit, giving away my era), but I go to our scholar for questions ranging from spelling to, as it happened, Jerome: he lived in Bethlehem for at least 15 years. Google helped set that straight, just as Jerome would have two millenia ago.
What a country.
Posted by Lawrence Cardon at August 12, 2003 11:53 AM
Google would have caught ‘millenia,’ too. If I’d asked — that part of checking is still a problem.
Posted by Lawrence Cardon at August 12, 2003 11:59 AM
What a wonderful medium.
