Underline This

No matter what I write here Spellcheck will invariably find something to draw its red squiggly lines under, as if it were a teacher with an overenthusiastic red pen and I was a particularly inept pupil.

The fact that it doesn’t recognise word “blogging” particularly annoys me, as it makes me feel as if my hobby is one of those really esoteric ones, like numismatics or speleology, neither of which, by the way, it recognises either.

Of course the obvious thing to so is to simply add the word to its dictionary, so yesterday evening I clicked the “Spelling and Grammar” button. It informed me, as I knew it would, that blogging was not a word, and offered me the alternatives “bogging”, “logging”, “flogging”, “clogging” and “slogging”.

While I know what the phrase “bogged down” means I am a bit doubtful about the word “bogging”, and would hate to think that I have spent the last three years doing it. Perhaps I am bogging down (or up?) the internet.

There are other words it could have suggested, such as “cogging”, “dogging”, fogging“, “hogging”, ”jogging” (perhaps it knows me too well by now to imagine that I could possibly mean that), “togging” or “snogging” (really sadly, it has just put a red line under “snogging”, which might explain why it is always so vicious with its red pen).

There are also these:

Frogging: the effect that a cold has upon one’s voice;
Grogging: Spellcheck keeps trying to change this to gorging, and to some extent it’s right – grogging is overindulgence in cheap rum;
Llogging: cutting down trees, in Wales.
Ogging: finding any excuse, at any time of the day, to drink and then sing lewd songs, like Nanny Ogg from the Terry Pratchett books;
Sogging: over-watering a plant;
And zogging: trying to take over the universe, like General Zog. It is a synonym of cowelling, which takes its name from Simon Cowell.

Believe me, Spellcheck has not enjoyed the last nine lines of this post.