What you need to understand is that it only looks so to you because of your ignorance. To a non-ignorant person, the uncorrected blunder looks far, far, far worse than the small blemish of the correction.

Yes, Microsoft are typical evil Americans for imposing their misspellings on everyone by default. But it is really not that hard to make standard English the default language for documents.

Anyway, you should be using LaTeX and OpenOffice, like the rest of the geeks.;-)

There, fixed that for you. The letter itself stands for its standard name.

What you've posted is just a travesty. You have an excuse only if you are actually blind, and need to consume large amounts of text aurally.

After a few seconds, one gets used to the voice, and its incomprehensible stream of sound becomes a comprehensible but ugly stream of sound. I'm currently listening to the Arabian Nights, read by Johanna Ward, with her precise, velvety voice. Each character sounds different, emphasis is where it needs to be, etc. With your way of doing things, not only is there no emphasis, no change of pace, no different intonation for dialogue, but things such as italics are deliberately stripped out even before the text reaches the synthesiser, along with all the diacritics necessary for words to be properly spelt and uttered. Résumé will become resume.

I've heard (sorry, "heared") Americans saying this before. I'm never quite sure whether they are making a bad joke, or they actually are that ignorant.

Why is it so fashionable to express hatred for Clippy?

It seems to me that doing so mainly conveys stupidity. More specifically, a form of stupidity I call "defaultitis". Clippy is only the default assistant. I always changed it to a different assistant straight away, usually either the red ball or the cat. They were cute, and the suggestions sometimes helped.

After a while, I found that I'd memorised all of Word's features, and turned off the assistant. Later, I graduated to OpenOffice, and then XeLaTeX. Hatred doesn't come into it. I've just moved on.

You fool. Sparr0 accepted your premise and made a separate point.

Although I want to laugh, I feel I must be fair. The country isn't "USA" but "the USA", which means that the "t" comes to mind first, even without the complication of it usually being called "America". I'm from a similarly-named country ("the UK"), and I have to say that Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Uruguay and Uganda spring to mind before countries with long official names beginning with "United", such as the United Arab Emirates and the United Mexican States.

But OK, I'll grant you that not being able to mention any at all is evidence of geographical ignorance.

I have some karma to burn, so I'll say it.

Military use of Free software is in violation of the spirit of the movement. Yes, the letter of the GNU licences doesn't stop you doing immoral things with code, but it is clear that if I took the time to contribute a nice little program to the human race, it wasn't so that some bastard could come along and in use it to facilitate the blowing apart of other human beings. The fatigue-wearing bullies of some regime halfway across the world, be it in Korea, India, the US, Honduras or anywhere else, are not welcome to the fruits of my labour.

Any discussion of this matter which does not consist either of plans to stop this happening, or sighing wishes that things could be different, is completely missing the point, and a sign of a lack of civilisation.

1. Some sort of oversized, macabre and malevolent, flying insect.
2. A man's face, or a mask covering it. His head is tilted back, and the mouth open. The dark blots on each side are either a beard or blood.
3. A coat of arms featuring a pair of deer-like humanoids presenting an object, perhaps a precious ark, between them. Trophies adorn the wall behind.
4. An Xmas tree. Or, a man with withered arms giving birth to a missile.
5. A vampire bat, or a moth.
6. A fox that has been skinned and turned into a case for a small ukulele- or lyre-like stringed instrument.
7. A pair of adorable bunny rabbits enjoying a two-headed anal dildo.
8. The colourful segmented titanium armour or natural carapace of a large, fearsome humanoid warrior, perhaps a troll or an extraterrestrial.
9. The sacrificial altar, or the huge statue, of a bull deity.
10. Too much is going on in this one. No clear image leaps to mind, except perhaps that of a child's painting.

You seem a little defensive. All I did is note that people seem to tend, ironically, to make mistakes when correcting other people. It's happened to me too. It's funny.

The excuse about an "error due to quick typing" versus ignorance is irrelevant to me. A mistake is a mistake. You even go on to admit that this is not actually a slip of the fingers in this case, so I don't know why you bothered to offer the excuse.

The "I'm not native" excuse is pretty lame too. I never use it when I write in other languages. Incidentally, I hate the "I'm dyslexic" excuse too. A mistake is a mistake. You've been corrected; it's no big deal; let's move on.