A new rhetorical device has come into vogue in modern discourse: the spell-check. Typically it comes at the end of a given article or essay, as a summary point, like so: "Finally, when I typed in Sarajevo my computer didn't recognize it, further underscoring the failure of East and West to find some common ground." Whole sociological portraits can be drawn with the spell-check; it is a short time now before it gets touted as the new new art.
     Anyone can do it. All you need is a few related words and a computer. Suppose you type in Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Mao. Word 97 knows them all. Try Ghandi, however, and you get a red squiggle underneath. Good guys have no place in the modern cultural consiousness. Your computer knows baddies Lenin and Trotsky, but not peace lovers Lennon, McCartney, and Starr. It remembers Auschwitz but not Woodstock. Your spell-check will gleefully accept Ku Klux Klan (try typing it in lower kase, your komputer will gently suggest that you kapitalize your k's). Ominously, Word 97 acknowledges German politicians Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schroeder - we may not know exactly what these men are up to but we can assume, from the company they keep in our spell check, that they are bad, bad men. The spell check, incidentally, approves of the word Reich.
     History and politics are of course just two of the arenas in which your spell check is prone to make profound observations. Try Ferrari and Lamborghini - both accepted by Word 97. Then try Thoreau and Walden, both rejected, and it is plain where modern American priorities lie: I climbed in my Corvette to try to suck the marrow out of speed, that I might not reach the end of life's journey to discover that I had never truly sped. Poe is not represented in the spell check lexicon, nor Steinbeck. What is truly shocking, however, is that an American computer could be so subliterate as to question Gatsby, Moby, and Huck. (Somewhat puzzling is the machine's familiarity with our cartoon heritage, accepting Daffy, Wile E. Coyote, and even Foghorn Leghorn).
     Whole volumes may soon be written in this new form, about our religious intolerance (Ramadan), our cultural illiteracy (Antonin Dvorak) and our many other shortcomings. The medium does most of the work itself. After several hours I could almost imagine my computer assuming human form and addressing me in a hick accent: "I heard of Napoleon before, but who the heck was Bonaparte?"

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