Apple closed my bug report yesterday as a duplicate, so more developers have reported it. I have a partial fix for the next update which suppresses the red underline for grammatical suggestions (which works by overriding Apple’s code and running a spell-check on words Apple wants to underline in isolation, so that their code cannot suggest it’s wrong in context). This only suppresses the red underlines in such cases, nothing else, because other than being able to alter which words get underlined, Apple’s spell-checker code is a black box, as I say. Still, it’s those red underlines that are driving me most mad. Fingers crossed Apple fixes the underlying issue soon.
This seems reminiscent of the ‘i’ → ‘A’ autocorrect problem on iOS, which was supposedly due to machine learning: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/11/07/ios-11-i
I’m gonna guess they’ve implemented machine learning for the spelling/grammar in Mojave too.
I’ve been reporting each individual instance, whether right or wrong, to Apple’s feedback form. I know there is little hope of any of them being read, but if enough people complain about the intrusion of this mechanism into basic dictionary-based spell checking, they might listen—or at least take it offline until it achieves a level of accuracy greater than 0.01%.
This problem — spurious grammar error highlights — has not been corrected with macOS Mojave 10.14.1.
I have, however, worked around it in 3.1 - there’s a beta available in the Beta Testing forum. It can only suppress spurious underlines, nothing else, though.
And here we see an example of me conducting inadequate research. I didn’t realize there were public betas of Scrivener. Busily retrieving now.
Have Apple coders fixed this in either 10.14.2 or public beta 10.14.3?
[I saw KB’s workaround. 
]
They don’t appear to have, with 10.14.2, no.
Thank you. 
Apple’s bug reporter has the original bug report on this issue (#45143612) still listed as “Open”, which means they haven’t fixed it even in an internal Apple build.
Does that mean they at least recognize and acknowledge its validity?
No, it just means that more than one developer has reported it to them and so there’s a bug report in the system for it. That they haven’t closed it as expected behaviour is promising, but on the other hand it can sometimes take months for them to decide to close a report as expected behaviour, so they still could do.
Good heavens, how can a failure of spellcheck lookup qualify as expected?
Well it could be that someone felt these kinds of inappropriate word uses are better classified as spelling errors. They might even have had the best of intentions in raising awareness of words that are often misused.
Has anyone else been clicking the “Learn” button whenever this happens (even if it is correct and your copy needs to be fixed)? I did that religiously for a while, and lately I haven’t noticed it happening. Of course I do most of my writing in Scrivener, which is patched, but a lot of that ends up being copied and pasted into email or other places where Apple’s unfettered red pen is always on by default.
The grammar check is another matter; the problem here is that in any file that hits or exceeds about 8000 words (I haven’t been able to pin down exactly when it happens, but it’s around that for word count), the spelling suggestions no longer appear when you ctrl/right-click the highlighted word.
So the spellchecker will see, for instance, when you’ve type hte instead of the, but if you right/ctrl-click it, you’re no longer given a list of suggestions to correct it. That can’t be expected behavior, because it’s clearly a failure in the word lookup code.
I don’t doubt it was done with good intentions but, of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. (L’enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs.)
James Gleick and Philip Pullman recently bantered over the spelling vs. grammar distinction: twitter.com/PhilipPullman/statu … 9322211328
And here’s Ursula Le Guin on the topic: “As for the stuff in your computer that pretends to correct your punctuation or grammar, disable it. These programs are on a pitifully low level of competence; they’ll chop your sentences short and stupidify your writing. Competence is up to you."
Oh, hell, I got my bug reports mixed up. You may well be right on the grammar — though if I have not asked my machine to check it for me, I do not appreciate its insistence on doing so — but my focus is on spellcheck lookup failure. Obviously I’m obsessing on it, sigh.