The James Joyce Spell-Checker

'The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity." This or almost any other line from "Finnegans Wake" displays James Joyce's delight in words the electronic spell-checker never heard of. How tickled he would have been to see The New York Times of last tearsday, which he placed between moanday and wailsday. It tells of a writer who's found more than 200 references to fishing after "pouring" over Joyce's novel for six months.

As we pore over our own columns we see how Joycean the spell-checker can be in accepting the word we had not meant to say. It gives us a fellow feeling with our newspiper colleagues.