This was posted to misc.education.language.english. 

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."