Spelling errors
 

I for one would appreciate a spellcheck tool.

My tail gets twisted
 

STILL when I see the "it's" vs "its" :mad: mess that has proliferated in e-mail, newsgroups, electronic bulletin boards and elsewhere, but I'm gradually adjusting to the confusion. :(
What I can't bear to countenance is the "then/than" misuse in the writings of obviously otherwise well-informed appearing in FT. "Then" is an adverb; "than" is a conjunction, and ne'er the two shall meet.
I doubt a spell-checker is what's needed; I'd favor a grammar-checker if I knew of one friendly or efficient enough to consider... :mad:

Download iespell (free)

And google now has a UBB spell checker on their toolbar.

My pet peeve is "loose" for "lose." However, the grammatical and related failings of FTers (seldom those of the poster, of course) have been beaten to death in a lot (not "alot") of other threads.

Trouble with spell checkers is, as has also been beaten to death in lots of places, is that they're (not "there," not "their") of no help at all (not "awl") when the mistake is a correctly spelled word, just not the one the poster meant to use (not "yews" or "ewes").

I could fill several pages with the mistakes my students hand in when they let Word not only catch their spelling errors but also decide how to fix them. A "multinational corporation with facilities in multiple lactations" comes to mind. :)

Do you let your students get away with "beated to death"? ;)

And how about "here, here?" Or "complementary upgrades?" Or "talking discretely?" None of these would be caught by a grammar checker or a spelling checker.

Since I'm slumming here ...

Shouldn't that be "Google now have a UBB spell checker on their toolbar" (in the British/Australian usage)? ;)

I think a complementary upgrade is when they upgrade you and downgrade someone else. (When they downgrade me and upgrade someone else, I have another word for it - which I won't mention here to preserve this thread's family-friendly rating.)