A word, please: Introducing my new dumbed-down (and expensive) upgrade

I’m an ornery consumer. I resent the idea that I need to shell out for a newer, shinier version of a thing I already have that works fine. My last car was a prime example: I drove it for 16 years until the paint on the roof began to oxidize and rust, at which point I seriously considered just having the roof repainted.

So when my 2017 MacBook Air laptop became obsolete, I vehemently did not care. I particularly resented the repeated warnings from Microsoft that my computer’s operating system was too old to allow me to update Word.

Why did it need updating? The old version, which I used every day for editing projects, worked fine. I stuck with my old technology as long as I could. But eventually, after airline websites stopped letting me log in to my frequent flyer accounts, I knew it was time.

Today I write to you from my brand-new, not-cheap laptop that serves me exactly as well as my old one did for the first six or seven years I owned it. I was finally able to update my version of Word, which comes with Copilot, an icon on the screen that I haven’t figured out how to remove yet and that offers me advanced AI options to “structure and refine this document,” “make this more concise,” and “refine this to be clear and professional.” That’s my job, literally, and if AI were as “I” as it claims, it would know I don’t need its insights in this arena.

What I do need — what every human needs — is help catching mistakes. So I figured I’d put my pricey new technology — purportedly functioning with an “intelligence” far superior to the spell-checkers I’ve been using for decades — to a test by writing the following passage. (Forgive the illogic in the paragraph below. I was looking for any flimsy structure in which to test the software on some specific words.)

“I went to City hall one day when the counsel was in season. The were there to reign in out-of-control, spending. Budget oversight was assigned to a click of Ivy league accountants, whom the mayor knew were good at peaking the curiosity of the attorney generals in every state. They had also been pedaling false information, particularly about the Bearing Strait and events in Bogata, Columbia.”

When I ran spell-check and grammar-check, the spelling was dubbed 100% correct. And the only “error” grammar check caught wasn’t even in the error-riddled passage. Instead, Word told me that in the phrase “for the first seven years I owned it” there should be a comma after “years.” Nope.

It didn’t notice that “City” and “hall” should be capitalized the same. It should have known that I meant the “council.” A human editor would have known that body was “in session” and not “in season” and that I meant “they” at the start of the next sentence.

The “intelligent” software didn’t know the correct term is “rein in.” It didn’t catch the misused comma before “spending,” and it didn’t catch “click” in place of “clique,” the lowercase “league” or the incorrect use of “whom” (a tricky one that I’ve discussed before in this column).

The software should know that “peaking” should have been “piquing,” the plural of “attorney general” is “attorneys general,” “pedaling” should be “peddling,” and Bering has no “a.” The one that shocked me most: Bogata is the capital of Colombia, not Columbia, which Word didn’t catch with or without the correct Spanish accent mark in the city name.

To be fair, it did flag two errors I tried to insert: “Bering Straight” and “sneak peak.” But the other egregious mistakes eluded this supposedly brilliant technology.

So instead of getting real value out of my recent purchase, it’s more likely I’m just a victim of digital extortion.

— June Casagrande is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.