For ages, people have tried to find ways around the simple fact that most people, professionals included, will repeatedly make spelling mistakes in anything they write. This is why editors, proofreaders, and entire software companies like Grammarly still exist. Let’s face it, often we are in a hurry when we need to write something and the result can be all the hilarity we can see here.
The root of many of these issues, as well as better-publicized examples, comes from the simple problem of the spellchecker or autocorrect having an incomplete list of words. One of the most famous examples of this goes all the way back to at least 2007 when multiple people online noticed that many automated spellcheckers only knew the word "cooperation" when it was spelled without the hyphen.
Older lists of words would only have “co-operation,” so when certain computers saw this word, they believed that it was simply a mistake. And for some reason, the “nearest” word to this mistake was “Cupertino,” the name of a town in California. The result was various, very official documents containing phrases like "South Asian Association for Regional Cupertino" and "presentation on African-German Cupertino".
#7 Sent Some Texts To My Employees After Setting The Shift To Give Them The Rundown For The Night. I Was In A Hurry To Get Out Of There And Didn't Want To Get Stuck On The Phone. I Wanted To Let Him Know They Would Only Have Six Staff Until 6 Pm. Oops. Anonymous Post Bc Of My Job
To this day, this issue is referred to as the “Cupertino effect” which, simply put, is the often hilarious result of a spellchecker not having a word in its dictionary and making an “interesting” substitution. Other famous examples include Routers publishing an article where the "Muttahida Qaumi Movement" became the "Muttonhead Quail Movement."
#10 Newbie Here! I Sent This To My Husband Yesterday. It Was Early And I Was At Work At Tired. I’m Up At 2 Am To Start Work A 3 Am
#12 My Brother Was Trying To Text Me That He Would "Be By In A Minute" But His Phone Had Other Plans
However, the “Cupertino effect” pales in comparison to the “Scunthorpe problem.” I’ll give you a moment to figure it out, it’s in the name. Long story short, the entire town of Scunthorpe struggled to create AOL accounts using their town's name because the site's filters kept detecting profanity.
This issue is quite persistent, as lists of “banned words” are not static and constantly evolve. At the same time, this means more, unrelated words, like Scunthorpe, end up getting incorrectly flagged. The solution tends to be constant human intervention, something that spellcheck was invented to prevent.
Other famous examples include shiitake mushrooms being misspelled, with a missing “i” and this word being marked as profanity. Fortunately, this particular instance has managed to rectify itself, as more people are familiar with the correct spelling of this Japanese word, as food blogging has taken off.
