As I get older, I’m noticing something. I don’t spellz so well anymore. You won’t notice this in my emails, letters, or proposals. That’s because I use spellcheck.
But on this site and in my handwriting you see another side of me, a drooling idiot who can’t spell simple words like “your,” “delegate,” or “perfect.”
It’s even more disturbing to me than it is to you. When I was in school (way back in the early 90s), we didn’t have spellcheck. Most people didn’t have personal computers. I didn’t even learn to type until the seventh grade. And did we have spellcheck on the word processing machines we learned on? Nope.
I wasn’t winning any spelling bees, but I could at least seem like something more than a grade school drop out.
In fact, back then there was a stigma associated with poor spelling. When one of the kids in my school decided to take a jab at our Principal (Mr. Wall), he famously wrote on the bathroom stall, “Brun Down the Wall” instead of “Burn Down the Wall.” He was then viewed and treated as something less intelligent than the rest of us.
This person would go on to become a very successful construction foreman and the first in our graduating class to buy a house. As a kid, he would also buy the other students’ dead cars for next to nothing, completely rebuild the engines, and sell them for a large profit. His business sense, ingenuity, and mechanical ability were highly advanced for his age.
But his spelling sucked. Therefore, he was considered the lovable fool.
Communication is becoming more important in our world. That is the trend I see. But ironically, the emphasis on grammar and spelling has seemed to diminish over time. We have become dependent on spellcheck like the crack addict is dependent on the rock. And while it seems harmless, I find myself crossing out and rewriting words that I should know how to spell.
Do you find yourself a victim of spellcheck? Is there something we can do about it? Leave a comment.
I fully support proper spelling and I proofread much like an obsessed Madman; however, if our proposal is packaged and ready for the door and there’s one typo in that package, I’m not editing it.
Here in Canada for a long while it has been extremely important that we choose the Canadian / British spelling over the American. But recently I’ve wondered if that is still as important or if we’re wasting time trying to hold on to a fading identity. American spelling is now rapant in Canadian documents, it’s become like a tidal wave that will run us down eventually no matter how loyal we are to spell check.