It's one thing to mistype "teh" instead of "the" while racing to put down all your latest ideas, spell-check wil catch that for you later. In fact, some intelligent word processors might just fix it automatically.

But what doesn't get caught are those instances where (and I have many of them) you type a real word but it isn't the one you thought you typed. This seriously happens to me all the time.

Little things like...

"I have to get lunch are twelve o'clock."

But in my head I distinctly heard "at" not "are" so where did are come from.

Is this some kind of misfiring brain signal or something?

My favorite example is when I typed 'butter' instead of 'bitter', so my writer's group got to laugh really hard at my sentence that read,
"The butter-tasting air of the curse seeped into the room."

I also work at a newspaper, and one edition went to press with a headline that read, "Crows gather in town..." The reporter MEANT to say "Crowds." My mom, upon reading the newspaper in print, muttered, "I was AT that event, and I don't remember seeing ANY crows." One of my co-workers managed to scrounge up three toy stuffed crows that night, and the next morning the reporter found them on his computer.

for example, "ta", which means one, with one (ironic) misplaced line becomes "choa" which means f***.

so be careful.

and one missplaced syllable when speaking it can turn "where is the bathroom" into "I want to..." well, you get what I mean.

On the other hand...the greatest problem with spell checking is when the word you mistakenly type in matches the spelling of a real-but-different word.

On the other other hand...spell checking always tells me my name is mispelled. Who am I going to believe, me or the dumb computer?

Homonyms are fascinating to me because of the work that I do. The rarer ones tickle my poetic fancy.

Fisher, fissure

Whole, hole

Role, roll

Waist, waste

I fought hard to keep from slipping in grandma check instead of grammar check, just because it might be funny.

THEIR and THERE is a problem for many, and one grammar check I played with, automatically flagged those two words to make sure they were correct. It flagged a few other pairs, but I cannot remember what they are.

quote:

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EWE WANT NO WYE EYE LICK EWE

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Ah! It's bugging me. What does that mean?

or

You won't know why I like you.

I have at times simply typed names whatever the keyboard decides them to be, going by how it sounds, then see if the spell check will come up with something more interesting than what I typed.

I used to gather names from the junk mail for interesting names and spelling. I still have those list, but really only use a hundred name list now.

quote:

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I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas thoghut slpeling was ipmorantt!

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One other condition for this to work is that the vowels have to remain in their original order.

edited to add: ...except for very short words.

There are some word combinations that have me putting an 'ing' on the end... or a 'u' after an o. Like poor spelled pour.

I think we program ourselves in completing words in our heads that aren't really the right words we intend to type.

For me, it's dislexic fingers that type letters in the rwnog sequence.