A spellchecker noting that I said “accomodate” instead of “accommodate” isn’t having a creative contribution because its purpose is to do pretty much the same thing every time…
Yes, for a simple spelling checker, that’s true. But it could get fuzzier with more advanced proofreading software. Suppose it read the whole paragraph and said, “The correct spelling is ‘accommodate’ but a better word here might be ‘tolerate’.”
My goal is not to propose where the lines should be; I honestly don’t know, and I’m not sure I even have an opinion. All I’m trying to do is to highlight that it might be more difficult to draw hard lines than many might assume.
Maybe that’s okay. Maybe we don’t need hard lines because most competitors are aligned on the spirit of the rule. But it still might be worthwhile acknowledging that the lines are blurry.