Words unwarranted, unintended

Writers and even editors have become a lazy lot as they depend mostly on Microsoft Word auto-correct feature to spell words correctly. This feature can be damaging for writers and editors and equally demeaning for the newspaper they work on. 'Intelligence' has for many times become 'intellectual,' and 'presidential' 'prudential.' Even the police 'superintendents' not knowing how to swim have become 'supernatants.' A reporting chief who has set his system to write 'Friday' whenever he keys in 'fri' has ended up in so many bizarre options on so many occasions. A report that reached the desk a few weeks ago contained 13 instances of 'meeting' spelt as 'meting.' Why? The reporter said the auto-correct feature was to blame. He, in fact, somehow earlier mishandled the feature to set 'meeting' to be replaced with 'meting.' Worse still could have happened if he had mistyped 'mating' for 'meting' and the worst that could happen, but did not, that they could get in print as they were spelt by the writer. Never let your writing tools become smarter than you. As for programs, the duffer, the better.