Corporations are covered inconsistently.In a bothersome oversight, Romney receives autocorrection but Obama doesn’t (but the note below might explain why). Modern vice presidents don’t fare particularly well. Nixon, Reagan, Clinton not Fillmore, McKinley, or Kennedy (not Kennedy? Really?). Certain public figures get capitalized, but others don’t.Keeping with mythology, there’s a slight bias in favor of the Greek gods compared to their Roman counterparts, with plenty of misses for both. This makes sense for mercury, earth, and mars (which have other meanings, so they’re hedging), but why Venus? Several of the planets aren’t capitalized.Only a few signs of the zodiac are automatically capitalized (Capricorn, Gemini, Sagittarius, Taurus).Pakistan is capitalized, but not India (because of the ink?) Canada but not Mexico Iraq but not Iran Austria but not Germany Sweden but not Finland. Many countries receive correction, but others are ignored.Watch out for the “New” states and the compass points (north, south, west) as well. But for some reason Iowa, Maine, Ohio, and Texas won’t be. When it comes to US states, most will be auto capitalized.But as with all the other corrections word processors make automatically for you, this isn’t one you should rely on blindly. Once again, this is often very helpful (especially if you’re a bit too quick and/or lazy with the shift keys). Yes: one of the things AutoCorrect does is “fix” capitalization for you. I’m not going to try to decipher any of those mysterious rules here - I only want to point out some of the quirks of Microsoft Word’s AutoCorrect feature where capitalization is involved. There are situations, however, when the rules used by spellcheckers seem mysterious and arbitrary to us mere mortals. That’s especially helpful if you use the same text or comment repeatedly (it’s sort of a poor-man’s macro feature). AutoCorrect, for example, is a very helpful feature, able to not only detect many common errors and correct them on the fly but also, if so programmed, to immediately convert user-defined strings and abbreviations into words, phrases, or even entire paragraphs of text. Spellcheck and it’s variants are useful assistants most of the time. Among the many mixed blessings bestowed on the world by technology is the ubiquitous word processor feature known as the spellchecker.
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