Sir, – I have just found out about a new feature in Microsoft Word, although only in some versions, the “inclusiveness” checker which looks for bias in relation to age, culture, gender and race, etc. It seems over the top.
I checked the latest Community Gardens Newsletter that I edit and there were 12 suggestions, some degendering comments about some members, but it also said that “pot” is profane in some cases. Our use of “pot” is only in reference to vegetables and our rules actually exclude growing pot. I thought we were just a group of mostly retired gardeners but suddenly we are much more interesting.
Maybe it’s time for us to take personal responsibility for what we write and say, rather than passing it over to computers to check. I didn’t expect the uprising of the robots and computers to involve grammar checking, although maybe it might make Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator easier to understand. – Yours, etc,
DENNIS FITZGERALD,
Melbourne,
Australia.