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Spell checking
By Marlene Kaiser of Kaisers Distributing
The Spell Checker Carol Burnett once said that she had to be a comedian because she never learned to type. I didn’t become a comedian because I did learn to type. I learned to type so well that I could pass a test at 90 something on a manual typewriter. Well, these old manuals, didn’t have spell checkers. We had to learn the spelling rules and keep a dictionary handy. It was a great skill to be able to correct a mistake on a page, so any typist became very proficient at not making mistakes. You had to have a typewriter eraser, it was a round wheel with brush to brush off the ink. You had to learn to erase just the ink, and not scratch the paper. Took a very light touch, and if your boss spotted the correction, you would have to retype the paper. In fact, the only way to copy a letter was to use blue carbon paper. I could type letter after letter or invoice after invoice without any typing mistakes, because it was so hard to make a correction. Manual typing was very hard on the hands. Most typists would go home every night with very sore hands and fingers. Then one day I saw an ad for an IBM electric typewriter. I convinced my boss I should have an electric typewriter. He bought a royal one, so I didn’t have the prestige of having an IBM. It did the job, helping my fingers to be less tired. Then came a bottle of white ink, called white out. If you were really careful, you could dab it on just so and it was much easier than trying to erase, but it still took skill and your knowledge to get things spelled right. Next in new technology, came the back button that did the dab of ink for you, it worked pretty well, and made for much better corrections. Aah, then came the spell checker in this stream of technology, at first, you still had to recognize a misspelled word, and spell check the whole page when you were through with it, but there was a tape in the typewriter unit that saved the letter so you didn’t have to retype, could just spell check. My spelling began to go to heck. I no longer was as careful. Now, that we have those wonderful little red squiggly lines under the words, I can spell check as I go along. I’m in seventh heaven now, but am anxiously waiting until the spell checker call tell that I meant the word pain when I typed the word pair. Every time I get a suggestion that I improve my spelling, I look and it is because I didn’t catch a word that has two or more spellings, or is spelled correctly, but with the wrong meaning in the context of that sentence. This gives me a chuckle, as it brings back a memory of my English teaching days. I’d be giving my very best lesson on dependent sentences, or something very interesting like that and everyone would be asleep, but spell a word wrong on the board, or make some mistake and the hands would shoot up to tell me about it. I loved those students, and assured them that English is so complicated that no one ever has it right all the time. How true that is! We all make English mistakes no matter how well we know the language, and it is such fun to use such a dynamic language. I fear the English language is losing much of its color because we no longer write like Charles Dickens with his long descriptions that would put fear, laughter, or some other feeling into your soul reading it. We now all read seven word sentences that sometimes are considered a paragraph. Oh well, it only concerns me now because for once in my life I have the time to peruse such trivial questions as spell checking. |
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Interesting, how technology has helped people with the skill to be able to spell in the first instance but does nothing for the people who can't! Or perhaps more to the point are to lazy to check.
Apparently one of the rules I learnt, i before e except after c does not apply as there are some 900 cases where the opposite is true. I haven't checked this so don't know how reliable the information is. I should ask my teenagers as they know everything!
CONTRIBUTOR'S REPLY
I wonder if they even teach the 7 most important spelling rules in school. I was a substitute school teacher, and would read essays for some English teachers when they got behind, and many of them were very well done.
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