Have you ever seen the word defiantly in a document when you meant to write definitely? Or fiends when you meant to write friends? Then you’ve probably been a victim of the Cupertino Effect. It’s the tendency of a spellchecker to replace misspellings with inappropriate suggestions.
The term originated when the word cooperation was often changed to Cupertino by older spell checkers which contained only the hyphenated form co-operation, Cupertino California being the home Apple Inc. If a user inadvertently clicked Change All they would end up with documents with strange phrasing such as valuable experience in international Cupertino or African-German Cupertino.
So the Cupertino Effect has come to mean failing to check that a suggested word is appropriate, though it’s now less of a problem than it used to be.
But good enough reason to be cautious if you ever have to write the word public.
Vivatraining 