Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️my favorite thing about modern software is that it's just as easy as always to hack it to work properly, except now it'll auto-update in a week and overwrite your hacks
somehow firefox has updated to un-fix my dictionary
so it seems my "hack the firefox dictionary" fix is going to un-hack itself every time firefox updates the en-US dictionary.
ugh.
computers were a mistake, networked computers doubly so
I wonder if I can just mark the dictionary read-only and keep firefox from updating it, or if that'll fail because it does the tempfile-rename trick
I have four complaints about firefox and two of them are the fucking autoupdates
oh I can disable updating the dictionary. that may be the simple solution I'm looking for.
a better solution would be to have my XPI rebuilt every time the upstream updates, since I don't want to be stuck in a March 2026 dictionary forever. it won't even have "foob"!
okay my new dictionary is in place and working again.
I think part of the problem is that it's replacing en-US instead of supplementing it, which I wasn't sure was possible without confusing all my websites into thinking I'm speaking something besides english.
which I am, I'm just speaking Late IRC English, which doesn't have the same capitalization rules as proper english
maybe I should just define it as en-IRC and let websites choke on my weird language code
Late IRC English uses capitalization for:
* Importance (and mock importance), not proper nouns. it's "california", but if you're talking about a new rule at your workplace, it might be "The Policy".
* acronyms, although this one is inconsistent.
* names, but only when that user capitalizes their name. so the user SuPaMaN is capitalized that way, always. To not match their capitalization (including internal capitalization) is a terrible insult in Late IRC English
* Importance (and mock importance), not proper nouns. it's "california", but if you're talking about a new rule at your workplace, it might be "The Policy".
* acronyms, although this one is inconsistent.
* names, but only when that user capitalizes their name. so the user SuPaMaN is capitalized that way, always. To not match their capitalization (including internal capitalization) is a terrible insult in Late IRC English
you don't need to capitalize the first letter of a sentence for the same reason you don't use punctuation at the end of your sentence: we have lines here, the end-of-sentence is implied
you only need to use punctuation at the end of sentences if you're going to end with ? or ! (or both!?) or if you are doing two or more sentences per line. periods separate sentences, they don't end them
although another feature of Late IRC English is the question-without-a-questionmark. usually in the case of the flat-what, where it's implied
fun fact: in one of my story serieses (The Dimensional Nexus), this has evolved into the dominant form of english, and it's gone a little farther: they've stopped using apostrophes entirely, and dropped the distinction between cardinals and ordinals.
so they'd say "in the 20 century the beatles released a song called dont ever change"
another Late IRC English thing is preferring emoticons to emoji, but that mainly is just because support used to be abysmal.
anyway I never explained what this modified dictionary does: it lowercases the whole thing.
this way "alaska" or "california" won't flag is misspelled, which I prefer because THEY'RE NOT. They're mis-capitalized, which is a grammar problem I'd argue about, not a spelling problem.
i'm dyslexic and I have capital-O Opinions about capitalization, so having a spellchecker that tells me I misspelled a proper noun is just a false positive for me, because I didn't. "california" is correctly spelled, I'm not wrong about this.
I want my spellchecker to tell me the difference between "conneticut" and "connecticut", not flag it as misspelled just because I didn't give proper deference to a state
while I'm complaining about spellcheckers:
I still want a keyboard command that does "find the last misspelled word, and replace it with the first suggestion"
I still want a keyboard command that does "find the last misspelled word, and replace it with the first suggestion"
I type fast and sloppy (like I make love), and I hate having to stop to fix my many, many spelling mistakes. being able to do ctrl-space or something to fix it and keep typing would really help
bachimusprime@foone >like i make love
HOLY SHIT????? FDJKDHFSKJHKJSDHEJKHSKFJDSHFKJDFHSDJFSDHK
HOLY SHIT????? FDJKDHFSKJHKJSDHEJKHSKFJDSHFKJDFHSDJFSDHK
a.k.a. Odie@foone likewise. It's so much worse being dyslexic too
@green YEP. Spellcheckers are such an important assistive device for me, it makes it so much more annoying when they're not working the way I want
@foone I still have my Franklin SPELLING ACE® somewhere! Invaluable in the 90s for essay writing and I used it often. Of course vowels and order still get me goofed everytime.
⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe
Ozzelot 
@ozzelot I know, right? I need a direct neural interface, for both.
(and yes I am making a direct connection between sex and typing, both are very important intimate actions)
@foone
i havent seen anyone who thinks about sex as deeply as your average asexual
probably because the allos are busy trying to cobble something together on pure empiricism, without ever considering what is in the planes above their attractions and actions
solo “claire” esta bien@foone Sigh, you used to be able to do this with a multi-key macro on macOS, for system text entry boxes. seems to have disappeared.
Argonel
Mauve 👁💜
Richard HollowayIn vim, I think that would be
[s1z=
and you could map it to a key press in your .vimrc. admittedly not much use if you don't use vim though.
Kat the Leopardess@foone Autocorrect drives my pony (sub) mad for the same reason. she cares to give proper spelling but she addresses us with lowercase (when using the text/computer/phone medium)
@Catwoman69y2k I know, it's so annoying! Spellcheckers clearly weren't developed by people who grew up in BDSM IRC rooms, where correctly capitalizing the names of Dominants was important!
alexi 
this is something i'm experiencing with my forced-lowercase pronouns. i've removed capital-I suggestions multiple times now, the software keeps putting them back in
@foone connect i cut
ARGVMI~1.PIFHow do you feel about German? As I recall, they capitalize all kinds of nouns.
@argv_minus_one not a huge fan, it seems like a loss of meaning. capitalizing everything means you don't get to pick and choose which ones you respect, which is an important signal in communication
tyzbit@foone @argv_minus_one same. I have 3 modes:
chill masto where i don't even capitalize "i". Cool People get capitalized. uncool people do not.
I guess what we're doing now is arguing; I use all of the punctuation and grammar at my disposal because heaven forbid I make a mistake like that which will certainly be sharked on.
infinite clown emoji 🤡
Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) 
@foone @argv_minus_one There was a brief window in the early 20th century in which German almost switched to the same rules English and most European languages have for capitalization (cf. Kleinschreibung). It didn't stick, unfortunately. Same goes for breaking up words (though that was a different time).
(Both are technically allowed, it's just Not Done™️)
Klaus Frank@foone well try them in German and their suggestion for capitalization will almost always be stupidly wrong...
Funnily the old spell checker in Office 2010 and before was way better at catching German capitalization errors.
And it gets even worse when you've both the English and German dictionary enabled at the same time, cause it cannot tell that it should use the German one when the rest of the sentence is in German instead of the English one...
Daniel Neuman@foone Oh yeah, like, what’s up with title capitalization in english. We don’t have that in swedish for example, and I don’t see any purpose. 🤔
Robbie Coleman 
@foone
This is capital punishment
This is capital punishment
g[ee gee gee gee baby, baby, baby~]@foone me when i stared at this for the longest time trying to figure out how you misspelled "california". 😂 bc... you didn't. (i thought maybe it was "caiifornia" with a capital "i" for the "l"). and now my browser is telling me i misspelled california lol (and "bc")
Samael 
@Kishi don't worry, we've replaced it with spelling and "just chuck it in an LLM"
i knoooooowwwwww, and it's fuxking horrible and makes me weep. Spelling and grammar were solved issues and someone screwed them up.
Like every tech bro thing (really, they're just parasites who glommed onto tech, not actually techy people themselves, but I digress), they took something good/working, broke it, broke it some more, built a new spying/lying version, and (most annoying to me) convinced everyone who has sway that it was better and so got it in as a replacement. infuriating.
@foone i think this really sounds more like "immediate typed english" that goes back to instant messaging forever, like on compuserve, QLink, AOL, etc
@sif that's true! I think Late IRC English just a specific dialect of chat-english that has roots in older instant messaging platforms like you mention, and has further evolved into, like, Modern Discord English, which is similar but uses more markdown and emojis
rooney (not the famous one)
heyda!@foone i just read through this whole thread and realized that this is how I type, except for in canadian english and I wish that browsers would stop underlining all of my proper stuff.
dominic@foone it's a cultural thing. I'm always thankful for chat applications that at least let me ctrl-z away the substituted emoji, and feel betrayed by those that then post an emoji anyway (I think Twitch does that?)
Airelle 🕸@barometz @foone In French, we put a (non-breakable) space between a word and a colon following, and I hate that when I write it to start a list, some text boxes (fu GitHub) will always start suggesting an emoticon that I accidentally confirm when pressing return.
Let me :
- write my list
- as I intended
@foone i learned recently in some spanish speaking areas that distinction is already mostly gone for ordinals over 10 or so
Klay@foone personally i am in the "aprostrophe is a letter" camp. its a letter which is by convention always silent, but there's no reason that should disqualify it. and like any silent letter, you can honestly get rid of it (colour -> color) unless this would create a different word (i'll -> ill).
Problem: this creates grammatical ambiguity, which can only be resolved by inferring from context, which some people are not good at.
@argv_minus_one certainly true, although like a lot of things, this isn't solely a problem of Late IRC English.
if you're talking to humans, ambiguity is inevitable
Persephone@foone you don't put commas at the end of your list. Its like json :P
@mindpersephone exactly. although I try to use hjson or json5 whenever I can, both of which let you have trailing commas :)
Gadfly (-booq-)@foone @mindpersephone And similarly, I sometimes use trailing commas on my sentences,
when trailing off,,
when trailing off,,
Andrew Zonenberg@foone yep sounds like correct IRC grammar to me
Jason Parker (he/they)@foone what are your rules on !? vs. ?!?
Dr David Mills@foone Not forgetting the OMGWTFBBQ!!!!1!!!!1111ONE!ELEVEN to signify sarcastic surprise.
(Regional variations of this apply)
Robin Bobcat@foone for Extra Bonus Fun, be one of those folks who uses an interrobang. ‽
Robrab“SuPaMaN” totally sounds like a chemical formula.