In the 1980s, some linguists fretted that spellcheckers might freeze English in place, pin it like a butterfly under glass. They imagined a future where every misspelling would be instantly shamed, every eccentricity scolded, every little improvisation strangled before it could wriggle into daylight. English, they feared, would stop drifting and start behaving — rather too much. Others welcomed the prospect of such discipline. Public prose already looked sloppy, and if a machine could catch the obvious blunders before they escaped into print, so much the better.
What happened was stranger. Just as computers got reasonably good at catching spelling errors, the culture quietly dismantled the institutions that had enforced literary standards for centuries. Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s and early 2000s, publishers thinned their copydesks, newspapers squeezed their editing staffs, and magazines sent their in-house stylists home with severance checks. The people who once stood between a sentence and the public were told to do more with less, then less with nothing, and then to disappear entirely.
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