Thursday, April 11, 2013

Bad words.

There are certain words that us writers can't spell...It happens, or at least I hope I'm not the ONLY one.

I'm reasonably confident in my spelling abilities. As a lover of all things wordy, I take pride in it.

These days I use Windows, and spell check, and all that awesome stuff that points out my mistakes without me asking. Nice, but...

I used to just be able to LOOK at the word after I typed it, and think "Nope, that doesn't seem right."  Then I would check my dictionary, and figure it out. I didn't mind that. It kept my brain sharp.

Now I can see that red squiggly line, and I already KNOW it's wrong...but I click to see how it's REALLY spelled.

It smacked of laziness, but I'm frequently pressed for time and don't really feel like spending the precious two minutes it would take to find it. No really, I'm sure I know how to spell words like immediately, tomorrow and definitely, given a few minutes. (Yaaaay! No squiggly lines this time! I must be learning something!)

But have you ever found a word that you couldn't spell if your life depended upon it? A word you spell SO BADLY that even the spell checker doesn't know what you're talking about? And you go to your ole' reliable dictionary, but IT DOESN'T WORK...because you're about to spend a lot of time searching for a word whose first letter is an 'R' but you have nothing else to go on because you don't know the next letter?

Here's mine: I got 'thymine.' I should've run a contest for this..."Figure out the word I'm trying to spell, and win a prize!"

Again...Rt-hymn. Not exactly, but I must be getting better. Its usually worse.

The word is 'Rhythm."  Just so you know, It took me a dictionary, spell-checker and a lot of frustration to get there. At least 6 minutes. One of the suggestions said' Rhythmic' but I was so frustrated,  I didn't see the connection.

How can I not get this? Why is it, that I LIKE this word, and it hates me so much? Does anyone else have this problem? Or am I just weird?

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