Bad Spellers of the World….Unite

Unite, that is, to make a commitment to check a dictionary (remember those?) when you don’t know how a word is spelled. Yes, I know what the funny t-shirt says but I have a different approach: "Hello, my name is Lydia, and I am a spelling snob." When you are not seeing or meeting a person face to face (or even by telephone) but are, rather, reading something they have written (as an e-mail, web post, blog entry, or something work related), that all-important first impression is based on the only thing you have before you: word choice, grammar, syntax, and spelling. As I recently commented to a friend and fellow wordsmith, bad spelling is, to me, the first-impression equivalent of spinach in the teeth, BO, and an unzipped fly all rolled into one. Oh, toss in there a limp handshake for good measure. (Lest you think I may have it out for children and those who are not particularly nimble of finger, rest assured that I bear no ill will for misspellings by youngsters and for the occasional tpyo.)

I’m even willing to make concessions for the fact that not everyone was even mildly interested in school, maybe was not as much of a geek as I was. But that was THEN. If you know you didn’t do so well in school THEN, I would think that NOW that you’re all, like, grown up and, you know, all, you would decide that maybe, just maybe, you need to take a few extra precautions to ensure that you present yourself well. If you read at all (cereal boxes, advertisements, weblogs) might you not notice that some people spell things differently than you? And, might that not cause a little niggling something in the back of your mind to think,“Hmm. That’s odd…wonder why they spell that differently. Let me look it up in the dictionary and see who’s right.” If you know you used to get lots of red circles on your term papers, just humble yourself now and realize that, yes, it is difficult to determine whether a word ends in "-ent" or "-ant" just by saying it. So go ahead, grab that big book!

My dictionary of choice is Noah Webster's First Edition of an American Dictionary of the English Language, but seriously, any reasonable dictionary--even the one on your computer or at Dictionary.com--should suffice for most.

Thought for the day: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction." -- Proverbs 1:7.