Another Reason Not to Depend on Word Processors

A few days ago, a lady, obviously a grammarian, wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper. In it, she complained about the fact that too many people nowadays depend too heavily on word processor programs like Microsoft Word to catch their errors in spelling and grammar. She went on to list some examples of erroneous phrases that would not be caught by those types of programs. In my own experience, I have found that she is exactly right.

However, I have also found that word processors flag some perfectly correct phrases as being erroneous. Let's look at two examples of phrases that Microsoft Word (at least, the version of it that I have) will "catch", even though they are correct.

When using the phrase, "it's cheaper", the program will sometimes flag "it's" with a green underscore and suggest that "its" be used instead. But in this case, "it's" is a contraction for "it is", so an apostrophe is supposed to be used before the 's.' "Its" without the apostrophe is used for the possessive form. So, if someone didn't know any better, they would let the program mislead them into making a grammatical error.

When using the phrase, "therein lies the problem", the program will flag "lies" with the same green underscore as in the previous example and suggest that "lays" be used. However, "lies" is the correct form of the verb to use here, as it is the active form, i.e., no one is "laying" the problem anywhere. One again, taking the program's suggestions at face value would lead to a grammatical error.