• 3-minute read
• 21st September 2016

The Perils of the Auto-Thesaurus!

In many ways, Microsoft Word is like a friend whose helpful spirit belies their clumsy nature: always there to lend a hand, but prone to making ridiculous mistakes while supposedly offering ‘assistance’.

The auto-thesaurus, for example, provides a quick way of finding synonyms for words you’ve used in an essay, yet can also lead to nonsense if not used with care.

The Problem

The auto-thesaurus in question is the ‘Synonyms’ option that appears in the menu when you right-click on a word in a document. This can be useful if you find yourself using a word frequently but can’t think of an alternative, since excessive repetition can make writing seem monotonous.

The problem is that, until the magical day when word processors come equipped with a fully functional AI and computers finally take over the world, Microsoft Word can only guess at what you’re trying to say. As such, some of its suggestions might not be appropriate.

In the previous sentence, for instance, clicking on ‘suggestions’ brings up a list of several words. Some of these are relevant to the context (e.g. ‘recommendations’). Others simply wouldn’t make sense, even if they might in a different context (e.g. ‘plans’, ‘offers’).

An Example

To fully illustrate this issue, we thought we’d use an example from the word of popular music. Namely, the chorus from ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls:

If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends,
Make it last forever, friendship never ends!
If you wanna be my lover, you have got to give,
Taking is too easy, but that’s the way it is.

A beautiful song, we’re sure you agree. Run it through Microsoft Word’s auto-thesaurus, however, and something very different emerges:

If you wanna remain my concubine, you gotta acquire through my networks,
Brand it latest incessantly, amity not ever trimmings!
If you wanna be my courtesan, you consume contracted near elasticity,
Captivating is moreover informal; however, that’s the tactic she is.

Umm… we’re not sure that would have been quite as big a hit, even in the ‘90s.

We could have used a picture of the actual Spice Girls, but these wax models looked more realistic. [Photo: InSapphoWeTrust/flickr]

The Solution

OK, that was an extreme example, since you wouldn’t usually replace most of the words in a sentence. But it does illustrate how meaning can change if you don’t pick your synonyms carefully.

The solution? Simple, really: Make sure you know what a word means before using it. If you’re not sure, look it up in a dictionary.

Getting your work proofread by a professional is also good, since we can give feedback on whether words are used correctly and suggest alternatives if we see something out of place. And we’re humans, which makes us infinitely more reliable than a computer.