It's not clear whether using "grate" instead of "great" is a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake. I'd argue it's a spelling mistake. The intent was not "my spell checker works a frame of metal bars," it was "my spell checker works well." It just so happens that the misspelled word matches a different word.

An example of a sentence like this with correct spelling but bad grammar would be "my spell checker works good." All of the words are what they're meant to be, but the last word is not the correct part of speech.=

But because computers are good at detecting "this doesn't match any known word" and bad at detecting "this matches a word but isn't the word you meant to use here," we've redefined "spell checking" to mean "find words that don't match any known word."

Your point about the joke is not correct. If I put my comment into ChatGPT and ask for a grammar check, it recognizes that it's a joke with deliberately bad grammar and suggests leaving it alone. If I put my comment into a grammar checker, it flags multiple errors in the joke. And "deterministic meaning-preserving ones"? Traditional spell/grammar checkers may be deterministic, but at no point have they ever been guaranteed to preserve meaning, or even been particularly good at it.

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xoa an hour ago | parent [-]

>It's not clear whether using "grate" instead of "great" is a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake.

It actually is clear, because words have meaning. "Spelling" refers specifically to the order of letters forming a given word [0, 1]. The proper use of words with a sentence, the "the study of the classes of words, their inflections, and their functions and relations in the sentence" [2] is the definition of "grammar"!

>I'd argue it's a spelling mistake.

Perhaps so, you're welcome to invent your own special snowflake definitions for words without much relation to decades/centuries of usage. It's a free country. But I would and will argue you are incorrect to do so and then expect to communicate with other humans.

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0: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spell

1: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/spell

2: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grammar

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wat10000 an hour ago | parent [-]

> "Spelling" refers specifically to the order of letters forming a given word

Right. And "the given word" in that particular example means "well" and is spelled G R E A T. G R A T E is a misspelling of that word.

Your position doesn't make any sense when you boil it down. I write some word as some sequence of letters. Whether it's correctly spelled depends not only on how that word is spelled, but how all other words, completely unrelated, are also spelled?

Let's say someone meant to write "bite" but wrote "byte" back in 1950. That's a misspelling. Did it retroactively become a grammar error when the word "byte" was coined in 1956? Or does the word have to exist at the time of writing for it to be a grammar error instead of a spelling error?

It's a lot more consistent if you consider the spelling relative to the word that's supposed to be there and accept that computer spell checkers miss the case where a misspelling happens to match a different word.

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xoa an hour ago | parent [-]

>And "the given word" in that particular example means "well" and is spelled G R E A T. G R A T E is a misspelling of that word.

"Grate" is a real word, and it is correctly spelled. In fact, within the purpose of the joke, it's even correctly used! But even if someone were to write that sentence out with no joke meaning, because perhaps they had learned English as a second language purely phonetically and were just trying to write things as they sounded, it'd be a grammar issue not a spelling one. Same as more common IRL hiccups like their/there, or its/it's. We even have other words like in the English language specifically to describe that in turn, like "homonym".

>Your position doesn't make any sense when you boil it down.

No, it's your position that makes no sense. You are effectively arguing that the word "grammar" shouldn't exist! There is in fact an objective difference between mechanically misspelling words and incorrectly using a homonym.

>I write some word as some sequence of letters. Whether it's correctly spelled depends not only on how that word is spelled, but how all other words, completely unrelated, are also spelled?

As I said, you're free to invent your own special snowflake definitions. But what you are writing is not in fact the shared definition at all. You for some reason are very determined to conflate "spelling" with "grammar". I linked you a few major sources, but this is not an area of contention, it has been consistently used for a very long time including in computers. It's even had plenty of attention over the decades. I still remember when a grammar checker was added for the first time to Microsoft Word and the debates about its quality (or lack thereof). There are even whole UX patterns around this, like coloring the squiggly lines below writing differently depending on if it's a spelling check error (commonly red) or grammar check (often blue). Precisely because grammar checking is harder and has often been iffier many people will disable it but leave spell checking on, because they're confident enough in their grammar and don't trust the computer, but don't want to accidentally post or send a message with "great" or "grate" as "graeyte".

Edit: in reply to wat10000 doing the 'ol virtual "good day to you SIR!" below:

I said it was a snowflake definition, given it's completely contrary to every dictionary and historical usage. I didn't call you yourself a snowflake.

And what's actually really fucking infuriating is when people like you simply refuse to use standard, shared dictionary definitions of words and widely used established software tools in your conversation and then further refuse to acknowledge it when corrected. And also refuse to engage with any substance and instead storm off in a virtual huff. You could have just gone "right I meant grammar correction, present grammar correction really kind of sucks and that's what I think people need most vs spelling correction" and that'd be that.

	▲	wat10000 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I have more to say, but repeatedly calling me a snowflake is pretty fucking infuriating, so I'll leave it.