NaNoWriMo: Day 12-16
I meant to update every day, but... well, what's there to write? "Wrote 658677 words today!" I suppose I could have written about my research issues, or setting, or creating characters, but instead, today, I'm going to talk about the wondrously useless spellcheck function on OpenOffice. It cheerfully inserts asinine suggestions for any letter cluster it doesn't immediately recognise. Which includes many place names and non-English personal names, so apparently one of the leading pre-war jazz guitarists, for instance, was called Fandango Reinhardt. One of my characters is a choleric man called Herr Spazierer (in English, that'd be Mr Walker), and OpenOffice practically demands that I change his name to Herr Spareribs. His wife Elfriede, therefore, has the married spell-checked name of Deep-fried Spareribs. Madame Dudevant, a nice old lady, narrowly missed being 'corrected' to Madame Deviant. She also lives in Centimetre, which is what OpenOffice thinks Montmartre should be called if you accidentally miss the first R. And my main character? His name is not Christoph Freitag, it's Christoph Fruitcake. Maybe that should be his underground nickname. (Appropriately enough, his best friend in Hamburg is corrected to Otto Blueberry.)
It's done worse things to foreign languages. Words in German have a distressing habit of being changed into names of well-known concentration camps (Buchhandlung - a bookshop - for instance, becomes Buchenwald, a much grimmer prospect), and since only about 1% of the story's words - mere scattered words at that - are in German, it's not worth trying to do a language change. Either that, or they're changed into English words that bear very little resemblance to what I was trying to type: if I was trying to write "A-n-g-u-s" but actually typed "K-a-s-s-e" (a Kasse is a checkout or a box office or a ticket office), I must have been typing by banging my fists against the keyboard.
I think my favourite corrections, though, have come when I typed in random names of real people just to see how badly OpenOffice would hiccup. So according to OpenOffice, the leader of Vichy France was Marshal Petunia, and the leaders of the Defense de la France student resistance group were Helene Monochromatic and her husband Flippable Deviancy. (Because if I really wanted to spell 'deviancy', I'd type 'Viannay', apparently. And it's amazing how many French surnames become some variant of 'deviant', while the German ones produce Surrealist results.)
As I'm now up to about 46,000 words... well, full speed ahead!
It's done worse things to foreign languages. Words in German have a distressing habit of being changed into names of well-known concentration camps (Buchhandlung - a bookshop - for instance, becomes Buchenwald, a much grimmer prospect), and since only about 1% of the story's words - mere scattered words at that - are in German, it's not worth trying to do a language change. Either that, or they're changed into English words that bear very little resemblance to what I was trying to type: if I was trying to write "A-n-g-u-s" but actually typed "K-a-s-s-e" (a Kasse is a checkout or a box office or a ticket office), I must have been typing by banging my fists against the keyboard.
I think my favourite corrections, though, have come when I typed in random names of real people just to see how badly OpenOffice would hiccup. So according to OpenOffice, the leader of Vichy France was Marshal Petunia, and the leaders of the Defense de la France student resistance group were Helene Monochromatic and her husband Flippable Deviancy. (Because if I really wanted to spell 'deviancy', I'd type 'Viannay', apparently. And it's amazing how many French surnames become some variant of 'deviant', while the German ones produce Surrealist results.)
As I'm now up to about 46,000 words... well, full speed ahead!