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".)

Two types of people

There are two types of people. Well, ok, there are more than two types of people, but for the purposes of this posting, there are two types of people with regard to language and grammar—A. people whose opinions I can trust without having to consult a reference book (style guide, grammar guide, dictionary, etc.), and B. the rest of you. I’m working on placing myself in category A, though I deserve to be in category B most of the times.

People who write in run-on sentences fall into category B, unless you are from a country that uses British English.

People who can’t properly use “comprise” fall into category B.

People who misuse “peruse” fall into category B.
Journalism teachers who try to tell me that “ok” is incorrect and that the proper spelling is either “o.k.” or “okay” (wrong and wrong) fall into category B------.

Aforementioned journalism teachers who try to tell me that senator is always capitalized (wrong again; according to both A.P. and Chicago, you do not capitalize, unless you use it as a title of address, directly preceding the senator’s name. Otherwise, it is a common noun.) fall into category B----------- as well.

People who write me emails and don’t capitalize the beginning of their sentences, whether it’s because they think this is cool or out of laziness or maybe because they are actually illiterate?—might fall into category B, depending on the time of month and how forgiving I feel.

• If you are sagacious broccoli, then I’ll notice the transgression, but you still fall into category A. If you are sagacious broccoli’s friends, then you’re probably automatically category A.)

• If you are some guy that I might’ve once had a crush on, but am now over b/c my fickle mind is in a fault-picking mood (i.e. “this is why we wouldn’t have worked out anyway”), then apologies for the inconsistency, but you’ll probably fall into category B.

Aforementioned journalism teachers who try to tell me that “till” is not a legitimate word and that the proper word is “til” (it’s not; check OED, Garner's and Chicago.) fall into category B.

People whose work I have to edit, because they can’t distinguish between “pass concerts” and “past concerts” also fall into category B.

So if you are one of these category B people, and I tell you that this sentence needs to be fixed because “entitled” is wrong in this context: “Our latest CD, entitled Idiotic Relaxing Music, is now available online.”

then please don’t write back and tell me that you “don’t quite agree with the word change of ‘entitled’ vs ‘titled’.”

Because, quite frankly, if I have to tell you that “pass concerts” should be past concerts, then I really don’t care whether you agree with me or not.

I don’t mean to be obnoxious, but please just make the change instead of wasting my time, because it now reads “. . . Our latest CD - Idiotic Relaxing Music” and this is just wrong, wrong, wrong, damnit. It’s one thing to use hyphens as substitutes for m-dashes on a blog or personal email or other private site, but on an official website, a hyphen should never be used as a substitute for an m-dash. Use two hyphens if you must.

Besides, Strunk and White, Chicago, AP and my Garner’s Language Usage Book all favor titled over entitled in this context.

If you had listened to me in the first place, then I wouldn’t have wasted 30 minutes blogging about this or have spent another 15 minutes firing off emails complaining about this or explaining that your “solution” is still wrong.

I have more productive ways to waste my time.

Hoity toity tastes in music but can't write basic English?

Dear Regular Poster in Pretentious Classical Music Elitists,

First, let me issue a disclaimer and say that perhaps I shouldn't be one to cast stones. . . but if you have very sophisticated tastes in music, far beyond my plebeian levels of appreciation, and make very good recommendations about recordings, etc., it would be far more impressive if you could convey this using proper grammar.

It is quite disappointing to listen to (er, read) you carry on intelligently about such-and-such a piece or about 12-tone-serialism, and notice that you just explained a difficult concept using run-on sentences and the wrong form of "its" and you're not British. (The Brits also have the same usage rules for its and it's as we do, but I believe run-on sentences are legit in their culture? If not, the Harry Potter books need some serious editing.)

I am usually opposed to cutting out music/art education to beef up on basic skills education, but when you extol the virtues of Louis Andriessen and Brian Ferneyhough, but cannot properly distinguish between than and then, or are averse to using a period between two independent clauses, I start to second guess my opinions about the tantamount importance of music education. Maybe we do need to confiscate that oboe until you can spell basic words. . ..

Cut you some slack, b/c you are a musician, engineer who plays music on the side, etc. and writing is not your forté? Well, I would, except that my musician friends (amateur, professional, etc.) can all write quite well--in fact, many of them better than people who write for a living. So I now have this unfortunate expectation and equate high music literacy with high literacy.

Besides, if you are going to talk about pretentious elitist subjects, you need to be pretentious and elitist about your writing, too, or else people (yours truly included) may not take you as seriously.

People who should or shouldn't be editors

Without giving my ultra-secret real name away. . . my complaint for the day is that people who cannot discern the difference between my name (which means almond child) and the ancient capital of Japan really should not have the job title "editor". (On the other hand, people whose job title is also "editor" might put punctuation outside the quotation marks not b/c they are ignorant, but b/c they feel that the American rule of putting commas and periods inside quotation marks makes no logical grammatical sense whatsoever.)