supercede etc.

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 14, 2005, at 4:03 PM, John Baker wrote:

> ... The situation is more difficult with "supercede," which
> Microsoft Word does not recognize as a misspelling (though it
> persists in marking every restrictive which and every use of the
> passive voice).

i can now tell you, thanks to a paper written by lia carpeneti, one
of my sophomore seminar students, that the Microsoft Word grammar
checker does *not* mark every use of the passive voice, only some
subset of them that the program can supply a "fix" for; this is made
clear on the relevant website.  entertainingly, the fixes are not
infrequently ungrammatical.  the program does flag

   The group of men who have emerged as Iraq's rulers is dominated by
aging former opposition politicians--heavy-set power brokers with
thick jowls and armed militias.

and suggests transforming it to

   Aging former opposition politicians--heavy-set power brokers with
thick jowls and armed militias dominates the group of men who have
emerged as Iraq's rulers.

as carpeneti notes, not only does this transformation alter the
information structure of the sentence, in a way that she and i both
find unsatisfactory, but it also introduces two genuine errors: the
missing matching dash and an incorrect subject-verb agreement.  eek.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)