I periodically use pine to check email, and frequently use the Ctrl-T command sequence to invoke the pine spell checker. When pine checks the spelling of a message, it hops from word-to-word in a goofy random fashion. While reading some pine documentation last week, I finally found out why:
“When you first use the standard Unix spell checker, it may appear that it is randomly jumping all around your message - actually, the spell checker processes your message one word at a time, in alphabetical order. Other spell checkers such as ispell for Unix operate differently and offer more features, such as creating a personal “dictionary” of words."*