MS Word Thesaurus - The Saga Continues

[Adam White <awhite@stpeters.sa.edu.au>]

The following text is from the "Microsoft Office Enterprise Insider"
newsletter (vol 1, iss 10) from
MicrosoftOffice_001075@news.newswire.microsoft.com

>--Bug? Joke? Coincidence? Office 97 Thesaurus Entry Had Some Users Wondering
>You may have read recently, either online or in print, about a "bug" in the
Microsoft Office 97 >thesaurus.  When a user searches the thesaurus for
the phrase, "Unable to follow directions," the >thesaurus does not have
a matching entry for that phrase, and thus returns a list of words and
>phrases that are close alphabetically but have no connection with the
original phrase.  In this
>case, the phrase "unable to have an erection" is highlighted in the list as
the entry that is closest >to the search phrase.  This is simply a
coincidence; there is no bug in the thesaurus, nor is this >some sly
joke sneaked in by one of our developers!  Nonetheless, in the
interests of sensitivity to >any customers who may find this offensive,
we have decided to remove the entry from the >upcoming Office 97
Service Release 2 (SR-2).

It would appear this has spread through-out cyberspace and made it all
the way to MS Technical Support! Note that it's not a bug in the
thesaurus, merely a co-incidence :-) Anyone know a synonym for "unable
to admit to a mistake"? :-)

- Adam