Seige

McKean’s law says that “Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.” And so it was that when I wrote a post in which I called attention to Donald Trump*’s non-standard pronunciation of siege, I misspelled the word as seige.

Which was fine by my Mac, whose spellchecker fails to recognize seige as a nonword. Here, look:



I typed the word and non-words you see above in TextEdit, chose Check Document Now from the Spelling and Grammar menu, and found that only hghgh was flagged. I tried again, choosing Show Spelling and Grammar, and the result was the same. Seige also passes for a word in MarsEdit, Pages, and, I would imagine, any app that uses the Mac’s spellcheck. Checking seige against the Mac’s dictionary with Look Up returns nothing: at least the dictionary knows that seige is not a word. I’m using macOS Mojave 10.14.6. Catalina users, do you get the same results?

The Blogger composing window sometimes flags seige. But only sometimes. As I type this post, the non-word is sometimes underlined in red, sometimes not. Now I’m wondering how many more non-words get by my Mac. But as everyone should already know, you can’t trust spellcheck.

[McKean’s law is named for the lexicographer Erin McKean. Years ago Erin helped me get an explanation of a strange sentence in the Mac’s digital thesaurus.]