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!