Which group do you fall into? I know which one I am in. But I think it is interesting which of us fall into which groups. When you are writing an email, text, blog, book, Word document, handwriting a card, list or (God forbid) a letter, do you always just spell everything right naturally? If not, do you get as close as you can and then hope that spell check takes care of the rest when on an electronic device? Do you turn the auto correct on and just hope that your text doesn't end up being forwarded to millions of people as the most embarrassing text ever in which you inadvertently talk dirty to your mother? Or do you still look words up? I know a few people who are perfectionists in some parts of their lives but for whom spelling does not matter. If you are one of those people that is fine. If I love, like or hate you the spelling issue does not play into that. It is simply an annoyance from time to time.
Can I tell you how much I hate getting a text that says something like:
"were goin to c u ther"
First of all you have to decipher it and try to figure out what in the hell the texter meant. Did they mean "We were going to see you there."??? If that is what they meant then does it mean that they aren't now? Did something happen to change their minds (whoever they are)? Or did they mean "We are going to see you there." but they were too lazy to find an apostrophe on their cell phone. Or perhaps they were never taught that apostrophes replace missing letters in conjunctions. If that's the case, wouldn't it be just as easy to have typed "we r going 2 c u there". I mean it's the same number of characters and it is much more clear. Granted you might have had to change screens to get to the 2. But how much work is that really when you can send 20 texts per minute? What I am saying is I understand your need for expediency when texting. But for the love of Pete! At least try to make me understand what you are trying to say. I don't like working through your texts like they are coming from someone who speaks English as a third language. And I hate having to send you 3 texts to try to clarify what the first one meant.
It is one thing when you use the wrong word through misspelling, but when auto correct takes a word that might have been sort of close to what you were trying to say and turns it into a different word entirely, I go nuts. The other day I got a text from a friend using the word "kick" in place of the word "key". I am certain that she was closer than that on her spelling, but due to the genius of IPhone's auto correct, I had to try to figure out that she meant "key box" instead of "kick box" when referring to a box on a doorknob that holds keys when a house is for sale. The most aggravating thing of all is when you spell a word correctly but auto correct doesn't recognize the word and changes it! This happens to me when I spell Nac in a text when referring to Nacogdoches. Auto correct always changes it to Nat so that my text reads something like.... "Heading to Nat! Woohoo!!!!" Then whoever I sent it to is left to try and figure out why in the hell I am going to someplace called "Nat" and what could possibly be so exciting about it that would warrant a "Woohoo" and four exclamation marks.
If you depend on spell check in email, step number one is to make sure that spell check is turned on. Step number two involves getting your word close enough that Bill Gates and his team of crack engineers can figure out what you meant and offer an appropriate suggestion on the correct spelling. If your computer doesn't know what the hell you meant by what you typed, then how do you suppose I will know? As my Mom used to say to me in second grade as I did my homework.... "Sound it out...."
I write a blog almost daily. I am by no means perfect. I find errors in my blog regularly after it is published. I'm sure that you find even more errors than I do. Sometimes I go back and correct the error when I find it. Other times I just let it go figuring that none of us are perfect. But I hope that most of my errors are grammar related and not spelling related. If there are any English teachers reading this, they are no doubt cringing now. I hate spelling errors. To me it is a sign of laziness. When I was a kid and asked my mom how to spell something I would always hear those three little words that I hated so.... "Look it up." Ugh! I thought, if I don't know how to spell it, how can I look it up??? As I got older, I realized that looking it up actually made me a better speller.
I have been writing a lot lately. When I write my blog, I write directly into a template that has a seemingly weak spell check system but it has one. If for instance I were to misspell the word misspell and spell it like this - mispel - it would return the following: misspell, dispel, misapply, Ispell and misplay. For the record, I tried to look up Ispell in my 30 year old American Heritage Dictionary (thinking that perhaps Ispell was a Greek god, maybe related to Isis) and it wasn't in there. So I had to Google it. Ironically, it is a spell check program. I say that the spell check program in my blog template is weak because sometimes it doesn't even come close to suggesting the appropriate word even though I am not too far off. When this happens, I'm a looker upper! I admit it freely.
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, I have a 30 year old American Heritage Dictionary. It is hard back and about four inches thick and I keep it handy for spelling emergencies and so that I can look definitions up. Yesterday, I used it three times in a day full of writing. I wrote for about nine hours yesterday. Three instances of looking a word up didn't seem extraordinary to me. However, if I had to look a word up in each paragraph I wrote, that would get old pretty quick. In two of those instances, I had a word in mind that I wanted to use, but I wasn't sure if it was the appropriate word for the context. On the third, I just flat out had no idea how to spell it and spell check wasn't helping me too much because I wasn't even close.
So, there you have it. I am a looker upper but only if it is necessary. My first option is to let spell check get it. On occasion, I have been known to Google the word and see if Google asks "Did you mean Perjury?" when I type the unknown "purgery". But I do actually attempt to get my spelling correct before any of you have to try to figure out what in the world I meant. So, the next time I misspell a simple word in my blog and you are left trying to figure out what I meant, I am sorry. My system failed. But at least you don't get blogs from me that read as follows:
U r luky too get nything at al.
Hapy 2sday!
No comments:
Post a Comment