Cruel!

[lise_lise]

I was writing a bit and Word's automatic grammar checker thought it would advise me.

You’d been cruel enough, you mean

It underlined cruel and suggested cruelled. That's fascinating. Cruelled. Now I'm looking at cruel and wondering what I missed.

Comments

[sietske]

All those years of steadily building a functional vocabulary when we could have been making up words on demand. Apparently.

[katharhino]

Uh what. That doesn’t work on multiple grammatical levels.

[lise_lise]

Maybe it's following the social media trend of 'they disappeared him' and 'they unalived him'. The same suspects would also be capable of 'cruelling him'.

Now, I don't follow SJW's or see a lot of those posts, but I've seen enough in passing to wonder about these new 'verbs' and why. People who consume this all day probably think it's correct.

[sietske]

I think this is more Microsoft no longer being willing to pay for use of a thesaurus, thinking they could get away with just programming in grammar rules because every word uses the same rules as every other word in the same category, obviously, especially in English which is not at all famously a patchwork language with exceptions upon exceptions.

TLDR Budget cuts sold as progress made things worse again.