The following headline in today's Wall Street Journal caught my attention: "Think of the Harm Taxing Tuition Wavers Will Do." I wondered who or what tuition wavers could be and why they would be taxed and dived right in. But the first sentence cited "tuition waivers," and I immediately understood that the editors of the esteemed Journal (our nation's largest newspaper by circulation, first published in 1889 and winner of 40 Pulitzer prizes), now rely on Spell-check, a computer program that identifies possible misspellings in a block of text by comparing it with a database of accepted spellings, instead of paying humans with actual brains to perform the highly skilled art of copy-editing.
If you ask me, a former newspaper copy-editor, that's pretty lame. Certainly in the scheme of horrible things, like earthquakes, mass shootings, childhood cancer and of course anything to do with Russia, typos in the newspaper are but petty annoyances. But are they? Whatever happened to excellence? Maybe Spell-check is why Donald Trump is our PUTOS.
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