Tag: Spelling

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Just to show you the power of almost 60 years of misspelling.

I was writing something with the word tragedy in it. I wrote tradgedy instead and a red line, signaling that I have the incorrect spelling, appeared. I refused to believe it. I convinced myself that it must be some sort of British/American spelling disagreement even though I was using an American English spelling tool. Then, I was intrigued by this error because there must be some interesting history behind it so I investigated further.

And I was shocked to learn that I was wrong in USA or in the UK. Tragedy is only spelt one way and that is tragedy. This is pretty embarrassing because I am pretty sure that anytime I have used tragedy in the past, I spelled in tradgedy.

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Until recently, I prided myself on being able to spell the most difficult word and if I couldn’t spell it, I could generally spot my error pretty quickly when I edited. As I age, though, I find that this super power is declining. Maybe aging isn’t to blame but I have only noticed the problem since I slipped over the 65 years marker. Whatever the reason, I have noticed my spelling has gone to Hell in a hand basket.

Here are two recent and, once you see them, embarrassing, mistakes. I tried to spell technically as tycnically. I was convinced that the tycn was correct and ically was wrong after I began to edit. I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to change the ically before realizing that perhaps the tycn was wrong. I still think that tycnically is a valid alternative.

Then there was exspell instead of expel. This misspelling I blame on my sounding it out. I say ex spell when it should be Ex pel.

I am not so worried about the actual misspelling because I think that when you are writing and you need to get the word on the page, putting down a close approximation of the word is enough until you go back and edit. But now I can’t see the problem where it once, on review, was easy for me to spot. I now make countless attempts to correct the wrong syllable.

Which means I am down to one super power – parallel parking.