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To: porcupine --''''> who wrote (791)	9/21/1998 4:51:00 PM
From: porcupine --''''>	Respond to of 1722

"Microsoft Word as Pundit: Software Maker Says It Isn't So" The Internet has been buzzing with all sorts of pranks and trivia related to President Clinton's troubles. But an e-mail tip that was widely circulated last week made the programmers of Microsoft Word, the word-processing software, seem predictive. The tip was this: Type the sentence, "I'd like to see Bill Clinton resign" in a Word document, highlight it, and then run it through the program's thesaurus (with the key combination Shift-F7 or by selecting Tools-Language-Thesaurus from the task-bar menu). The waggish thesaurus retorts with the phrase, "I'll drink to that." Strangely, the trick works even in versions of Word that predate Clinton's election to the White House. Did political oracles help compile Word? No. As it turns out, the Word thesaurus issues the same response with the phrases, "I'd like to see Bill Gates go broke," and "I'd like to see my stocks go up" -- and any other phrase beginning with simply "I'd . . ." People closely familiar with Word have known about the quirk for years. Apparently, one of them recently started spreading the Clinton resignation item. Planting hidden pranks in software is a time-honored programmers' tradition, of course. And Microsoft Word is known to have its fair share of these. Run the sequence of letters "zzzz" through Word's spell-checker, for example, and the program suggests that you really meant to type "sex." But "I'll drink to that" wasn't the result of programmer mischief. Rather, explained, John Duncan, a Microsoft product manager, the natural-language thesaurus in Word offers phrases, listed alphabetically, that it considers to be possible alternatives for the word used. Sometimes, he explains, the natural-language feature, in the effort to simulate conversational human speech, unknowingly gets a little too creative. In all but the latest edition of Word, for example, if a user checks the phrase "Unable to follow directions" with the thesaurus, the first suggested alternative is "Unable to have an erection." Duncan said the latest version of Word omits these two potentially embarrassing phrase suggestions. "We want to be sensitive to customers," he said. --LAURIE J. FLYNN Copyright New York Times Company 1998