Heart and Mind

You Can Look it Up

When you were young and you asked an adult or teacher how to spell something, what did they always say?

"Look it up in the dictionary."

Am I right or am I right?

This was always a source of annoyance, too. It was a snarky kind of answer. You sought knowledge, but were given what basically amounts to a lecture. After all, despite the fact that the speaker may not have known themselves, they usually did and, therefore, the implied sentiments were, "I *could* tell you how to spell it, but why don't you do a little work and find out for yourself?" It was like you had to earn your knowledge; you had to earn the right to know how to spell something properly. No wonder so many adults have piss-poor spelling and an even worse attitude about it. Lots of people I know don't even attempt to spell things right when they email me...as long as it's close enough to be understood, they take a lax attitude and knowingly let the misspelling fly. So I think when people ask how to spell things, they're already showing more initiative than many. You should help them out, if you know the answer, and not offer some sarcastic insult that suggests they not be so lazy.

Still, that's not even the worst of it. The biggest reason why I always hated when people told me to "look it up in the dictionary" is, I think, an obvious one. In order to look something up in the dictionary, you have to know how to f**kin' spell it! And if I knew that, I wouldn't be asking.

OK, OK...I know the stock response that my detractors are going to counter with. They're going to say that if you know at least somewhat how it's spelled, you can usually find the word and get confirmation on the complete spelling. And, yes, that's sometimes true (often, even). But it's notalways true. Sometimes you're just completely clueless as to where to even begin, beyond a letter or so. "Well I know it starts with an S, but is it 'so' or 'su?' And even if I knew that, is it 's_f' or 's_ph?' " After all, I'm not necessarily talking about commonplace words you spell every day. So...you go find out how efficient it is to look at every word in the dictionary that begins with an S and is followed by a vowel.

Well, these days I don't use an old-fashioned paper dictionary, as I'd assume would be the case with most people. I use online dictionaries or software dictionaries or even just the spell check from the program I'm typing in, where it gives me those squiggly red lines under offending text. And even though this makes it easier, sometimes it's still a real bitch. I'll sometimes type a word 3, 4, 8 times before I find the right spelling. It becomes like a game of mastermind, because spell-check "suggestions" don't always come through. So I end up doing something akin to cracking a puzzle. "OK, maybe it's got double S and single L. Nope. OK, I already tried double LL. But did I try double L in combination with single S? I can't remember!" You think I have that kind of time to waste?

posted by Steve @ 2:07 PM