🚀 go-pugleaf

   I was correcting the English in a report written by my roommate
(who is Swiss-German and is here doing postgraduate work in
educational psychology).  She had written:  "Mike prevented William
from working by putting his hand over William's keyboard.  Mike found
this very sparingly and did it again and again."

   I asked her, "What do you mean by 'sparingly'?"

   She replied that she had originally written "funny", but when she
ran the report through the grammar-checker on her computer, it told
her that "funny" was trite and suggested "sparingly" as a substitute.

   Baffled, I crossed out "sparingly" and wrote "amusing".

   The next morning, it hit me: the grammar-checker must have said
something like "The word 'funny' is trite.  Use sparingly."

--
misrael@scripps.edu			Mark Israel