A few weeks ago, I missed a typo on the blog and a friend gave me a heads up. That was nice. A good friend is someone who tells you when there's spinach stuck in your front tooth. Spellchecker doesn't work in the blog title field, but that's a poor excuse for an embarrassing misspelled word for all the world to see.
Then I did it again a few days ago (excitment instead of excitement) which made me worry. I know how to spell that word. Don't I? After all these years, I've become so lazy and reliant on spellchecker I just start typing and when the red line appears click the auto correct, without even trying to spell the word. After a while, you can't remember if the spelling is "privilege" or "priviledge."
So I found a spelling app on my phone called "Scholar" and started working up through the levels. I was surprised how many fairly simple words (see below) I stumbled over in the multiple choice questions at first. Thankfully that dusty part of my brain seemed to kick in again and I'm up to level 16. That's somewhat reassuring and fun. I always liked spelling in school.
As one who has tried for over half a century to leave the "w" out of "sword," I have to say I'm a phonetic speller. The problem is, English is not a phonetic language. What raises the hairs on the back of my neck, though, is my growing tendency to chose the wrong homonym. The sentence calls for "meet" and I will type "meat." The sentence calls for "their" and I will type "there." After 27+ years of typing for a living, the connection between brain and fingers is so hard-wired and subconscious that I can sit there and watch myself do it. Gack.
ReplyDeletePity the poor non-English speaker trying to learn this random language. So many spellings make no sense at all, it just comes down to brute memorization. And there are words my brain still INSISTS on spelling wrong. Gack, indeed.
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