My spell-check boycott

I'm boycotting auto spell-check.

It's not that I don't need spell-check. In fact, I'm turning it off, b/c I've become so dependent on it that I've become a sort of spelling idiot and that thought is freaking me out more than the embarrassing possibility of making a really idiotic spelling mistake when I email one of my friends.

I'm sick of outsourcing my brain like that.

Spell-check is the root of all things evil and stupid.

Perhaps I'm exaggerating slightly, but only slightly. It probably isn't the cause of the current war we are in, but I do believe it has led to a dumbing down of American culture, as well as a deterioration of my own spelling skills.

I mean, have we become so illiterate that we now have to have the auto spell-check activated on even our evite responses and Facebook board posts?

Way back when, I used to be a proficient speller. And that was without the help of auto spell-check.

I once caught my college Expos 101 teacher making a really dumb spelling mistake, which wouldn't have been so egregious if she weren't making fun of someone else's spelling. In fact, I remember this so vividly, even though it was (gasp!) almost 15 years ago. She said something like, "well, everyone knows that there aren't two s's in 'necessary'." My entire class (it was an honors class, so we all knew how to spell pretty well.)--we all looked at each other and shook our heads.

Ever since the advent of ubiquitous automatic spell-check, I've felt my spelling powers slowly declining. "Necessary" is a great example of my dumbed-down spelling. I am 90 percent sure that I'm spelling it correctly 94.5 percent of the time. But one time, I couldn't remember if the s or c was doubled. Granted, that was once out of 80 times that I've used that word, but back in high school and college, I was 100 percent certain, 100 percent of the time of how to spell this word, without the aid of a dotted red line to tell me that the correct spelling is with 2 s's rather than with 2 c's.

Back in the days before the ubiquitous dotted red line (i.e. all throughout high school, college, and grad school) I used to consult a thing called a dictionary--the book form with actual pages that need flipping, rather than the online versions--if I was the slightest bit uncertain of the spelling of a word. I am so lazy that after looking up a word once or twice, the incentive to not have to spend an extra two minutes to look up the word again was enough of an impetus to learn the spelling of whatever the troublesome word was.

However, now that the ubiquitous auto spell-check feature helpfully underlines misspellings, I can change the letter combinations around until the red line disappeareth, without troubling myself to get off my comfortable perch and pull the dictionary off my shelf to look anything up.

(In fact, I am now wondering if I have opened my 9th edition Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary once in the past three months, and I am embarrassed to say that I don't think I have. Oh great tome-- how I have neglected thee!)

This convenience isn't necessarily a bad thing. I agree that looking up words on an online dictionary is so much easier than getting up, going to my bookshelf, grabbing my dictionary and looking up a word the old-fashioned way. On the one hand, this motivates me to look up words more frequently.

The problem is that the convenience that auto spell-check offers also gives me no incentive to learn my top-10 trouble words.

On the rarer and rarer occasions that I have to hand write a memo and I don't have the auto-red-line feature to obsessively track my spelling, there are several words that I get quite insecure over.

Necessary was never one of these words, but last winter, while writing Christmas cards, I did actually have to think twice about whether it was necessary or neccesary. The second one looked obviously wrong, but the fact that I had even a slight doubt over a word that I was once so confident about made me uneasy. (I'm a control freak like that.)

Here are some of my top-10 trouble words. They trip me up half of the time:
• occasionally--another word in which I cannot remember for the life in me whether it's the c or s that is doubled. I think I have since resolved this by remembering that it is the inverse of necessary. (And this is another reason I need to be ROCK SOLID on the spelling of "necessary": I use it as a mnemonic to base other spellings on!)
• embarrass--I forget to double the "r" 50 percent of the time. I want to spell it like harass.
• mnemonic--another one that kills me. I always want to insert a "u" in there, because it looks so much like pneumonia.
• rhythm--usually a word I get right, but I want to insert a phantom "u" b/c it looks like it has too little vowels.
• no one--I've always wanted to turn this onto one word. Somebody, everybody, nobody. Someone, everyone, so why not noone?

There are a couple of other words that always give me trouble, but I can't think of them right now.

Also, relying on spell-check has made me a lousy editor of my own work because I focus more on the spelling errors. (Yes, there is also grammar check, but it is so useless that I have mentally shut it off. In fact, it doesn't even register in my brain anymore.)

The following potentially embarrassing errors would go by completely unnoticed if one were to rely solely on spell-check for their error-checking:

1. I gave a pubic performance of Beethoven.

A few years ago, sage broccoli and I went to a talk and I think we saw "pubic spending" or somesuch thing on a slide and we couldn't suppress our giggles. For the rest of the talk. We were really embarrassed for the speaker. I don't know what was the problem with the rest of the audience--whether they simply didn't notice or whether they had better self control than the two of us did, but we were the only ones with this uncontrollable giggling problem.

It's one thing to mistake "rent" for "rend" but gosh, if I ever give a public presentation and present a slide on "pubic spending", I will absolutely die, unless I'm giving this presentation to the Bush administration. Then it would be kind of funny.

2. We got a standing ovulation.

Ok, this is not necessarily a spelling error. Someone--a cute seventh-grader--did actually once say this. The mother of erstwhile-seventh-grader, now-25-year-old, never lets her live it down. It is actually quite funny, but again, I don't want to write a review and inadvertently write about standing ovulations.

3. The bored of education deliberated on xyz.

I admit that when I was the president of the student congress back in high school and was charged with the task of rewriting the student constitution, I did deliberately misspell every instance of "board of education" and spelled it "bored of education"--well, because that was a more befitting description of them--but my advisor made me change every instance of it before we sent a draft to the board of ed for approval.

For my irreverent advisor, it was fine to misspell "board" thus and forget to change it, but not everyone in the real world has his sense of humor. I don't think it would fly at my current job, for example. I have on several occasions almost forgotten to change a similarly worded entity (nowadays "bored of trustees") when switching from my "unofficial facetious draft" to the "official draft for VIPs".

When I say "boycott" though, I'm not entirely turning off spell-check. If only my spelling were so reliable! I still plan to spell-check at the end, but at least this way, it forces me to proofread first.

Thus, dear reader (all 4 of you? Though yesterday, according to my handy dandy site checker, there were 12 of you. . ..), I apologize in advance for all dumb spelling (and other) errors I make and have made whether in email or on this page or in any other context.

Trust me. I who kvetch about people who can't distinguish between its and it's or properly use comprise--find it infinitely embarrassing to make such mistakes.

But there are times that embarrassment is a good thing; for one, it keeps me on my toes. I am more likely to learn from a single embarrassing moment than from repeated dictionary runs.

(I just spell-checked this post, after checking myself first, and there were three errors I did not catch. Granted it's 1:50 a.m. and I am tired as hell, but there is no excuse for "cannnot" or "writting".)