Speling Errers
I am SO much better at spelling than I used to be. When I was in high school, my spelling was atrocious. Word processing, contrary to common wisdom, actually helped my spelling, because I got tired of the spell check flagging the same words over and over again. But homonyms still get me. Especially when I’m typing quickly.
Break and brake are constant thorns in my side. I use brake quite a bit, because I typeset quite a few labels for automotive accessories. But almost instinctually, I’ll type the word break, instead. I did the opposite in a poem once, though, spelling it braking when I meant breaking. It colored the poem in an entirely different way.
I’m especially bad with it’s and its and your and you’re. Most people would assume that I default to its and your, but most people would be wrong. I like apostrophes, so I tend to always use it’s and you’re when it makes no sense at all to use the contraction. Again, it’s typing quickly that gets me. Plus, I have a sincere aversion to double-checking my writing until AFTER I publish it or send in that proof.
I’m not sure why.
But spell checkers, and also the half-assed grammar checkers, can’t beat double- and triple-checking my typing. I almost always see the mistake a day later, when I re-read it. I’ve gotten to the point where spell checkers don’t really give me any assistance. I hardly use them anymore, because the mistakes I make are beyond their programming.
However, it still pays to run a spell check once in a while. Today, I found out that I’ve been spelling squeak incorrectly, for years. Squeek! It just seems right to me with the two Es. Who decided that an onomatopoetic word should conform to some loose rule of English vowel coupling? I know ea can sound like “eeeeeeeeee!” in words like leak and creak, but ee works just as well in leek and creek. Damned homophones. Squeek apparently is very unacceptable, even though it appears in roughly half-a-million web pages. Still, Google helpfully wonders if I meant to search for squeak. How nice.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:07 PM, 06 September 2006
Pressing the ESC key after typing in a character or part of a word while in iChat, Mail, TextEdit, etc. will reveal a drop down menu. This menu contains all the words your computer knows that begin with that combination of letters! Pretty neat, and a great time saver!!
[Ed. note— this is a comment from a spammer, but it does work, so I thought I’d include it. I’ve removed the links to whatever shit he was trying to scam us into going to. —JR]
Posted by: Johanson at September 20, 2006 3:17 AM