Eccentric Flower:199901/spell that again please

thirteen january

spell that again, please?

I got a fair amount of mail about my spelling rant. Everyone is worried about their own spelling, it seems ... worried they missed something obvious and that I was talking about them, or defiant about their perceived mistakes. I find this amusing. A group of people who are secretly paranoid about their ability to spell!

Not to worry. Let me reiterate: Everyone makes a certain number of spelling errors. People usually have a handful of problematic words which plague them their entire life.

I have trouble with "obssession" (I can never remember whether to double the first S) and "commemorate" (I grew up in the South, so I feel like there should be an N in there, because in the South you hear it said "connemerate") and a few others. When I was in school it took me the longest time to learn to spell "separate" - I want that first A to be an E.

And sometimes I spell things the wrong way on purpose. I tend to favor the British spellings of some words - a correspondent pointed out my spelling of "judgment" (in America there's another E in there). I told him to count my blessings. After many years, my various editors have finally thrashed me enough that I don't write "colour" or "neighbour" - but the temptation is so strong in the latter case that I usually have to go back and correct it.

It's not the occasional problems I worry about. I worry about prose where it's clear the person doesn't even try to spell properly, that the person doesn't have a clue. Maybe those two aren't equivalent, but in my mind they are: If you don't try, I assume you don't care.

What may be confusing you is that I began the original rant by talking about advertising. With advertising, and other public media, the bar is much higher. With your personal writing, I just want to get the impression you're doing your best - that you're making the effort. With advertising, I have a zero tolerance policy. They've got people who are being paid a lot of money to not misspell words.

I took Marc to a restaurant last night which was considerably more upscale than the Pain, and lo, they had misspelled "caesar" prominently too. Not in a sign hand-written by some hapless employee, but in their printed materials. That's unacceptable. Verily, the next time I see "ceasar" anywhere, I am going to wake Caesar Cardini from the dead and the two of us are going to go throw heads of romaine lettuce at the offending parties.

There are only a few individual spelling errors which, by themselves, can cause me to scream in anguish when I see them in personal writing. One of them is "it's" and "its." Nonelvis goes into fits about "insure" vs. "ensure" and "infer" vs. "imply." Personally, I could care less about the former. If Nonelvis were here, she'd correct that to "I couldn't care less." We all have our bugbears and hobgoblins.

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