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 *E*s. 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][1]. Still, Google helpfully wonders if I meant to search for *squeak*. How nice.
[1]: http://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=squeek&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
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One reply on “Speling Errers”
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]