Six of us — three philosophers, two linguists, and a mathematician — were having dinner the Café Noir in Providence on Friday night, and when three of us decided on the excellent boeuf bourguignon, someone at the table told a story of a colleague who tried to include the phrase boeuf bourguignon in a word-processed file and found that the spell-checker recommended correcting the spelling to Beowulf Burlington.
We all giggled happily, and referred to the dish as Beowulf Burlington for the rest of the evening, but later (cursed as I am with the habits of a scholar) I checked with Microsoft Word on a Mac, and it proposes no such thing (though it does, rather in a rather desperate list, suggest correction boeuf to either beau, beef, beefs, beefy, bogus, bough, bout, or pouf). Google doesn’t offer the alleged correction either, of course (there are hundreds of recipes for the beef dish in question).
I sometimes wonder if we aren’t doomed to a future of suspiciously implausible and uncheckable cupertino effect stories forever — an endless series of newly invented spell-checking chestnuts, false but enjoyed too much to be checked up on or rejected, like Eskimo words for snow, or the old story about the preposition-stranding correction that Churchill almost certainly never made.