Correct Me if I’m Wrong
By Veronica MacDonald Ditko
An Accidental Anthropologist
I’m sure there’s a book somewhere that will explain this to me. If I spell “and” wrong in a Microsoft Word document, Spell Check will fix it automatically after I hit the space bar. But if a longer word has just one letter out of place, it gets wavy red line under it.
If Spell Check took the liberty of changing “and”, why won’t it fix bigger words too? Where does it end? And how bad of a typist am I really? I have no clue. Because by the time I get to the end of the sentence, Spell Check has erased my faux pas.
Trust me, I’m not perfect.
Somewhere in time it became not OK to spell words wrong. I’m apt to blame 5th Grade teachers. Mine was a real stickler. Did I mention she was a Marine? Did I mention what a travesty it was when one of her students spelled “separate” wrong in a spelling bee final? It was a disaster. She had just told us “a rat” was in the word. But poor Ian forgot that in his nervousness.
If you have ever looked at old documents, The Constitution even, you will see the document riddled with mistakes. I used to think that maybe they just spelled almost every word differently. That might be true sometimes, but no, they are blatant miswriting or typos.
Part of the problem was there were no standards to tell people how to spell things. Often they did it phonetically. In 1755 Samuel Johnson published the widely regarded and then later criticized “A Dictionary of the English Language.” The first Noah Webster Dictionary came out in 1828. The Oxford Dictionary was out in 1884. What are the chances that regular American folk saw these books at all?
Unfortunately with the wide availability of dictionaries now, a person is thought to be dumb when they misspell a word.
But often I see something I wrote from my phone, which takes way more liberties at fixing my text, is just plain wrong. Funny even. I think I’d rather have my misspelled words than what my phone comes up with!
Let me be imperfect. I’m ok with that. Are you?
Veronica MacDonald Ditko is originally from the Jersey Shore, but married and settled in northern New Jersey. Her journalism career started a decade ago after studying Psychology and Anthropology in Massachusetts. She has written for several newspapers and magazines including The Daily Hampshire Gazette, The Springfield Union News and Sunday Republican, Happi, Chemical Week, The Hawthorne Press, The Jewish Standard, Suite101.com and more.