Check that spell check
Icould bore you with a long list of things I don’t do well. For starters, there’s swimming, car repair and working with any technology introduced after the Bush administration (the first one).
But instead of pointing out my shortcomings, I will focus on one of the few things in which I take pride: spelling.
Yes, I’m that guy. Always nit-picking my co-workers about the “I before the E,” shaking my head at misspelled church signs (“Don’t give in to Satin”), and resisting the temptation to correct my Facebook friends (“All the Braves do is loose”).
My parents and sisters taught me to read before I started school, and I have never stopped. I think constant reading results in good spelling habits, perhaps due to memory and recognition.
That’s why I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I drive by a school sign that reads, “Enjoy Your Spring Brake” or a store sign that invites you to “Transfur Your Prescriptions.”
I often think about the guy in the highway sign-making department who had one job, and ended up with this masterpiece: “Yeild to Oncoming Traffic.” There’s that I before the E again. Except after C.
Before social media and texting, we didn’t know if our friends were good spellers. Now it’s all out in the open. “You’re” becomes “Your,” especially in my all-time favorite Facebook post, “Your a idiot.” That dude just lost his argument.
Spell check, which didn’t exist back in the day, is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing when you just don’t have time to look up commonly misspelled words like “criticize” or “embarrass.” As in, “That knowit-all David Carroll loves to criticize and embarrass me when I misspell a word!”
But spell check can be a curse when it substitutes a correctly spelled word for the one you actually intend to use. If you’re complaining about the head of the school, spell check can’t help you if you write, “That mean principle kept my son after school today.”
It also didn’t help the person who wrote this about a superintendent search: “I hope they get a good one this time, because the steaks are really high.” (It’s hard to argue with that one, because steaks really are expensive.) Or the proud mom who
posted a new baby picture: “I have the most precious little angle.”
Often we just get in a hurry. An important job in a TV newsroom is the graphics operator, the person who puts the words on the screen. It could be a written statement from an elected official, or merely the name of the person who is speaking. We once had a guest who called himself “The Singing Cowboy.” Unfortunately, the graphics person made one little mistake, identifying the man as “The Sinning Cowboy.” Come to think of it, that may have encouraged some viewers to pay closer attention.
Many folks who are quite intelligent struggle with commonly misspelled words that sound identical. Each day, I’ll overhear a debate about affect or effect; capital or capitol; insure or ensure; lead or led; trooper or trouper; pin or pen; ladder or latter; except or accept; and even words that don’t sound exactly alike, but are awfully close, like precede and proceed.
There are words we just make up, because we didn’t quite hear them right. That would explain why some people think that small cart with one wheel and two handles is a “wheel barrel.” It almost makes sense.
It’s not all the fault of spell check, of course. I can’t blame anyone but the author when I read that Uncle Fred is about to undergo a quadroople bypass. Or when a teenage girl brags about the pleasing scent her true love is wearing: “I love my boyfriend’s colon.”
I’ve stopped rolling my eyes when someone writes, “Hurry and enjoy the scenery, it’s peek season!” I must admit, I do want to take a peek. Same goes when our weather man gets asked about winter temperatures. “How low is the windshield factor?” Well, that may determine how long it will take to scrape off the ice in the morning.
And, there’s this. I saw a sign, directed at employees behind a customer service counter. “No Talking Aloud On Cell Phones, or You Will Be Wrote Up.” We could talk all day about that one.
So kids, study hard, and become a proficient speller. Maybe you’ll end up as the top student of your senior class. And I don’t mean the “valid Victorian.”
David Carroll, a Chattanooga news anchor, is the author of “Volunteer Bama Dawg,” a collection of his best stories. You may contact him at 900 Whitehall Road, Chattanooga, TN 37405 or
3dc@epbfi.com. The polk County standard Journal encourages letters to the editor on topics of general interest, but reserves the right to edit them for content and length. letters should be no longer than 400 words and must include the writer’s name, address and daytime phone number for verification purposes.