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.
\n*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.
\nI’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.
\nI’m not sure why.
\nBut 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.
\nHowever, 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.
\n[1]: http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?rls=en&q=squeek&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-subjects"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nj3d-2L","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/macphoenix.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/macphoenix.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/macphoenix.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macphoenix.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macphoenix.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/macphoenix.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/macphoenix.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macphoenix.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macphoenix.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}