James May, who hosts a program about automobiles on BBC2, wrote a guest essay for The Telegraph today in which he objected to the spell-checking and grammar-checking functions of Microsoft WORD:
"Essentially, there's a bloke somewhere in the Microsoft empire whose pedantry and smugness has been codified in digital form so that he has become as omnipotent as God, only rather less creative. He even tries to correct the spelling of some words, when he can't possibly know how to spell them because I've only just made them up. It drives me mental."
He's only as omnipotent as you let him be. Don't like it, turn it off.
One of the quite wonderful features of the features offered in WORD (and most all other Microsoft products) is the ability to make them stop being "helpful" ... which I find very helpful. Perhaps the British car guy was unable to find the "off switch" in WORD.
Don't like it, turn it off. Amen, Brother. I never cease to be amazed at people who complain about something like that--or a TV show, or a web site for that matter--when all they have to do to ease their stress is not turn it on. Don't like spell-check? Turn it off! You say there's nothing on TV? Rent a movie, read a book, take a walk! Can't stand the web site you've found? Find another--or again, read a book, take a walk, take up a craft! Sheesh!
[/soapbox rant]
Not having read the article in the Torygraph, I don't know this for sure, but the complaint may have been included to help him pad out his column on a slow day ...
is the expression "it drives me mental."
Don't like it, turn it off.
Apparently he does exactly that, when possible. From the Telegraph article:
I am writing this, at home, on a computer on which pretty much every function (apart from the one making the characters appear on the screen) has been disabled. But when I'm at the Top Gear office, the desktop word engine provided for me there constantly attempts to correct my grammar.
Possibly the IT people at Top Gear are to blame for limiting user access to and control of functions like these.
Anna S sez that what drives her mental is the expression "drives me mental."
"Mental" means, innocently enough, pertaining to the mind. It is used as an adjective to indicate those things which are of or in or from the mind.
But it has acquired a colloquial meaning (probably a reduction from "mental illness" and/or "mental disease" and/or "mental defect" and/or "mental case") meaning insane, deranged, crazy, psychotic, or psychiatrically disordered. In the latter sense, it is used in expressions like "drives me mental" and "he got all mental."
As I understand the climate of the Board these days, only prescriptivists are allowed to decry this usage, and even they may not state that it drives them mental.
only prescriptivists are allowed to decry this usage
Or either, only prescriptivists would bother to decry this usage.
even they may not state that it drives them mental
There's a little yin in the yang and a little yang in the yin.
Dorothy Sayers wrote, in Unnatural Death (1927) "I gather she was a little queer towards the end ... a bit mental, I think you people call it?"