The Speller is the Feller

This morning I went back and read yesterday’s blog. While I was congratulating myself on my keen insight and wit, I noticed glaring discrepancies in the text. I had written the word attended when I meant to write attendant, and I had written the word possible when I meant to write possibly, to give two examples. I’m someone who should know the value of proofreading, being an English major at a writing intensive school, but its amazing that I only caught these mistakes after the third or forth proof. The biggest mistake I made was misspelling Prince Philip’s name. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I had done it once, but I used his name four or five times, the final time being the punch line of the piece. I just spent the past couple of minutes correcting this in my post.

I’ve become so reliant on spell-check that I rarely use a dictionary for spelling anymore. I was a terrible speller at school, and when I grew up I took comfort in the fact that Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill were both reportedly poor spellers. Didn’t Winston Churchill say something like “I never trust a man who spells a word the same way twice.”? Probably not, but I’m not good with quotes either. Of course for Jefferson, in the eighteenth-century, there was still no coherent standardized form for spelling, so he gets a pass.

I’m hoping I get better about spelling, but I feel that the crutch of spell-check is hindering me by doing the work for me. I could, if I was hyper-disciplined, turn spell-check off and keep an OED in readiness next to my right hand, but I’m not ready yet to make that kind of commitment. Sometimes I mangle a word so badly that spell-check gives me a very discouraging, grayed-out, “no-suggestions.” Then I do have to turn to my dictionary. But what do you do when you can’t even figure out what letter the word starts with? That’s a terrible thing to have to admit, but since I’m in confessional mode we might as well go all the way. In the last post I used the word alliteration. Now I’ve seen this word written on black-boards (and dry-erase boards) since the ninth grade, but for some reason I was positive it began with an i. Even when spell-check tried to convince me I was wasn’t persuaded. I actually looked it up to see if the first suggestion they gave me was the same word I meant. It was, and I felt like an imbecile.

My sister Lindsay helped me out yesterday by posing as Prince Philip in her comment. She spelled the name correctly which sent me frantically searching the internet to check on the correct spelling of the name. Spell-check hadn’t helped me here for some reason, possibly because there may be two spellings for the name. But, annoyingly, the name doesn’t follow a rule I thought I learned in school about how a vowel is short if it is followed by a double consonant, like in apple. We don’t pronounce the name Philip Fie-lipp. So I thought it stood to reason that if the first i is short then it must be followed by two ls. So much for reason. I should have paid more attention to the credits of the movie before I wrote my clever little post.

I suppose these are things that a writer has to live with every day. I know phenomenally good spellers, people who can rattle off words like endometriosis without missing a beat. It must be a wonderful thing. I’m going to keep working on my spelling, along with the speed of my hunt-and-peck typing and my inappropriate use of punctuation. It seems to me a bit like a carpenter who doesn’t know how to use sandpaper.

For fun, I kept a list of all the words that I misspelled during the writing of this post. Some of them are typos, committed in the rush of typing, but many of them are examples of how bad it’s become.

congradualted
congratuling
riting
reportedy
spellin
This one is kind of funny, because this is probably how I would say it, bein’ from the South.
greyed
thay
wors
imbilcile
leafned
consanebt
innapprpriate


Tommorrow, I might write a post about all of the typos in this post.