Little Spelling Bastards

[elaithin]

Dude. My last name is 'Weber' - and people STILL mispronounce it. They like to say WEE-ber, sounding like 'weaver'. Yes, I recognize that's the root of the word, but I have never in my life met anyone who pronounced their name that way.

 

[BrotherBenny]

Christopher said:
Well, I've just been going over copyedits on Places of Exile, and apparently I still have problems with "indispensable" (I used -ible) and "embarrassing" (I used one R) -- and on one occasion I misspelled one of the alien character names I created! Which isn't the first time I've done that. I should keep lists of character names or something.

Christopher, might I suggest a mnemonic for you. "Harass people with one R, embarrass them with two."

See if it helps.

 

[Dayton Ward]

You know, I keep reading the title of this thread, and thinking of all those 2nd and 3rd graders kicking ass and taking names at the spelling bee (all while making me run for my dictionary)....


We now return you to regularly-scheduled programming.

 

[Stevil2001]

Christopher said:
Not at all. Spell checkers are like cruise control -- they can reduce your workload a little so long as you monitor their results, but if you assume they can do it all for you, you're headed for disaster. I've been hearing about cases where reporters careless with their spellcheckers were publishing stories about presidential candidates such as John Moccasin, Mike Hackable, Rude Giuliani, and Barracks Abeam.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005313.html

My preferred favorite example of the Cupertino Effect is when the word "copulation" was accidentally used in a couple government documents. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002911.html

 

[TGTheodore]

Steve Mollmann said:
My preferred favorite example of the Cupertino Effect is when the word "copulation" was accidentally used in a couple government documents.

Ironic in that you change three letters in "copulate" and you get my given surname. Yes, I've had people stop saying it mid-pronunciation and look at me.

My standard reply: "It's a LONG 'o'".

--Ted

 

[Starbreaker]

I catch myself writing dosen't instead of doesn't a lot.

 

[Greg Cox]

Hollar/holler.

And spell checkers can be tricky where scifi is concerned. My old version of WordPerfect kept trying to turn "Cardassian" into "courtesan"--which aren't quite the same thing!

 

[Christopher]

That's why I keep my spellchecker turned off.

Well, that and the fact that I was very nearly a spelling bee champion back in sixth grade. I missed the word "ultimo" because the reader pronounced it in a strange way that made it sound like "altimo" to me. I'm still mad about that.

 

[TheAlmanac]

KRAD said:

captcalhoun said:
manoeuvres. did i even spell it right then?

You did if you're in Europe. On the U.S. side of the Atlantic, it's maneuvers.

Actually, it's "manoeuvre" in Canada, too (the third paragraph of this article on the CBC website is a recent example), even though we're on "the US side of the Atlantic."

As for misspelling given names, I get people using "Edger" every once in a while. At that point, I feel they've failed to meet my minimum intelligence threshold...

 

[trampledamage]

TheAlmanac said:

Actually, it's "manoeuvre" in Canada, too (the third paragraph of this article on the CBC website is a recent example), even though we're on "the US side of the Atlantic."

Yeah, Canadian English is a mix of British spellings and American spellings. So much fun if you move here from one of those countries...

 

[garamet]

It took me until the Millennium to realize there were two "n"s in "millennium."

A bunch of others, but I can't think of them at the moment...

 

[Braxton]

90% of these words are easy guys. A little work on your part and you can get the correct spelling down in no time. I have never believed a spell checker and never will. They're making everyone more stupid because so many think it is the god of spelling corrections.

 

[Lindley]

^Everyone makes typos.

Recently, I had a guy do a complete proofread on everything written so far for my EV Firefly project. (It's quite a bit, really.)

9/10 times, I had spelled "Business" as "buisness." Very little else was wrong, but that was all over the place. Wow.

 

[trampledamage]

Braxton said:
90% of these words are easy guys. A little work on your part and you can get the correct spelling down in no time. I have never believed a spell checker and never will. They're making everyone more stupid because so many think it is the god of spelling corrections.

It doesn't matter if they're 'easy' or not, some words I just can never remember how to spell correctly. Because I've had so many years of not remembering how to spell separate, I second guess myself about whether I've spelled it right and usually pick the wrong one...

 

[garamet]

Lindley said:
^Everyone makes typos.

Recently, I had a guy do a complete proofread on everything written so far for my EV Firefly project. (It's quite a bit, really.)

9/10 times, I had spelled "Business" as "buisness." Very little else was wrong, but that was all over the place. Wow.

Here's another interesting thought: I get paid to proof other people's stuff, and I'm good, but I miss errors in my own stuff.

I'm betting that happens to a lot of folks.

 

[Deleted 2]

LightningStorm said:
separate/seperate

This is the one I'm most painfully aware of.

 

[David Mack]

Apparently, I have a knack for misspelling "exhilarate" as "exhilirate", at least on first pass. It always makes me stop and reason out the Latin roots of the word, and then I fix it.

 

[Christopher]

^^Oh, is that the same root as in "hilarious?" Never noticed that before.

 

[David Mack]

^ Indeed, it is.

 

[garamet]

I'm on a personal mission to teach the English-speaking world - or at least my clients - that there's no "a" in "definitely."