"Undiedrawers"

In the past few months I have shopped for underwear at least three times. I'm not talking fancy, special edition panties either. Just plain ol' undiedrawers. Fruit of the Loom. White wonders. I have been less than impressed with the Charlottesville Wal-Mart for many reasons, but the fact that I have sought out regular women's underwear in a common size and style on multiple occasions to no avail had just about gotten my goat. Finally they stocked my FTLs, but wouldn't you know it, they were only available in a 3-pack. A three-pack!? What the heck? A woman who buys white Fruit of the Looms is generally the stock-up-for-a-year-or-two type. She is probably shopping for undies because her too-stained-or-holey-to-wear-in-case-of-an-accident ones are beginning to outnumber her decent ones. She's not looking to buy a meager three pair. She's overhauling her panty drawer! If they sold underwear in large packs at Sam's, she'd probably cut to the chase and buy them in bulk. That way, when the inevitable pesky stains happen, she could just toss a pair as necessary without guilt rather than go to all that annoying stain removal effort. THREE? I could not believe I had to buy a 3-pack of underwear. I never knew it mattered to me. I just took for granted that plain white standard underwear come in packs sized to carry you at least through the work-week. If you want fancy, go spend seven bucks a pair at Victoria's Secret and feel fancy all day long. I clean poopy diapers and dirty dishes and vacuum up dehydrated peas and such off my daughter's splat mat every day. I don't need fancy underwear riding up my butt crack. I don't understand how having a wedgy all day makes women feel sexy and alluring and ready to hop in the sack at the end of a long work day (no matter what kind of work). I'm just too practical I guess. I digress.

Anyway, so later at home I take out my scanty panty pack to put them in the laundry basket only to discover (as I shake my head in disbelief that I have only three new pair of panties after all these months of searching) that the individual little panty roll-ups are each taped! TAPED!? After roughly ten years of buying and laundering my own panties, I can honestly say I have never had to peel tape off of every single pair before tossing them into the wash. Unbelievable. Maybe that's why they only put three to a pack now. If you bought five at a time, you would be so mad at Fruit of the Loom for how long it takes to untape them that you'd surely cross over to Hanes Her Way.

Blogger Malfunctioning!

Pardon the strange formatting on the Spelling Woes entry. Evidently there are some bugs in the formatting shortcuts, which caused the whole entry to foul up. Blogger has, of course, heard about it. I am not happy.

Spelling Woes

I followed a yellow cab this evening with the following statement prominently displayed across its back end: BAD SPELLERS OF THE WORLD UNIGHT.

I found that amusing.

Just the other night, Britt and I were talking about how few people are actually good spellers. Those of us who are decent spellers are often annoyed by the copious spelling errors that run rampant on blogs these days. Blogs are not like books, which go through rigorous editing before they go to print. (Don't even get me started on books with numerous spelling errors and typos even after being edited!) Blog writers are just regular people like me--people who have something to say (or nothing, really) and choose to express it for the world to see. Many do not concern themselves with spelling errors, duplicated words, etc. It's just not important. Young people in particular have been spoiled by the spell check feature and no longer commit things to memory. Why bother to look things up in order to learn how to spell something when you can just click the little ABC-check mark icon that appears on every form of word processing these days? Spelling seems to be a lost art, like mental math. (Granted, there are a lot of folks out there who can do math in their heads with ease. My husband is among them, and he comes in VERY handy sometimes when I don't have my calculator.)

I used to be a great speller of words I was familiar with. (I know that was poor grammar structure, but give me a break...it reads better that way.) In third grade I was defeated in the classroom spelling bee after I hastily declared "Minute, m-u-n-i-t-e, minute." Crushing blow! I always got a strange satisfaction when my fifth grade teacher's answer to the oft-asked question "Mr. Morgan, how you spell _____?" was "d-i-c-t-i-o-n-a-r-y." I value the look-it-up approach to learning. My friends asked me how to spell words all the time during my junior high and high school years. I guess I had a reputation for being a good speller. But now I find that I have to stop and check my spelling more and more often. Is it a function of aging? Is it another lingering side-effect of pregnancy and child birth, much like my loss of nouns? Is it lack of brain exercise due to shameful reliance on the spell checker? Probably all of the above, to some degree. It drives me crazy when I can't spell something correctly. And it drives me even more crazy to see published material with misspellings that even I can recognize. (I don't have a huge vocabulary, so the really fancy words could be garbled and I would hardly know the difference.) That is just unacceptable. So the anal side of me wants to inform my blog friend of spelling and grammar errors I notice on his well-established and respected blog (I would want to know they are out there distracting the occasional good speller who comes across my written passages.), but that would make me his editor and he didn't ask me to be his editor. And it's just a blog, after all. I restrain myself. And I have to (painstakingly) remind myself time and time again that most people just don't care about spelling and grammar errors. At least click the spell checker, people!