Skip to main content

Get it Right

Dear reader I do the best to produce a quality blog for you, but I thought I should warn you I face a severe handicap.  I am in fact orthographically challenged. That's right dear reader, run for that dictionary. My first hint here is that it is the second most common meaning  found in most dictionaries I am concerned with here.  Yes, that was the one that caused the greatest pedagogical concern.  I take some relief in the fact that Edgar Allen Poe was also so challenged and in his day there was little relief for the affliction.  Today of course, we have automatic orthographic correction features that call to our attention standard orthography.  That's right, I use non-standard orthographic, and not always deliberately.  When I do this it deliberately it may be a form of neologism (now you really need a dictionary, right?) or it may be a orthographically induced form of flash tongue (thieves' Latin or peddler's French) . Remember reader, if it's not in the dictionary try you thesaurus. Actually my disability is so severe that I had already had several orthographic seizures while writing this, and have relied on automatic orthographic notification and correction each time. My great fear is that one of the seizures will look so much like the normal state that the correction will not occur.   Who first noticed that I had orthographic seizures?  My second grade teacher, Ms. Speling.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Serenading the Donkey

Over the years I have had many times when I have had to call out others on their words, behavior, or attitudes on race, class or ethnicity and I have used a variety of means to get my point across.  The first  such incident was when I was 13 years old and my sister and a friend were skipping rope to the rope song that uses the "N_" word.   I said we don't use that word in this place and the girls argued with me about it. I just said that if they used that word I would go tell Grandpa, and they complied.  In a high school the teacher had let the discussion degenerate and the topic of "welfare" came up and a girl stated  an old stereotype that my Daddy says "All the blacks go pick up their welfare checks in Cadillacs."  I wanted that direction of the conversation to end immediately, so I blurted out "Well your Daddy is a racist."  There was silence in the room for a couple of minutes and then the teacher changed the subject.  When people have b
 Striking at Bourgeois Values with "Free Stuff"  Why is it that in middle class neighborhoods no one would think anything of it if you are having a "yard sale"  or a "moving sale", spending your entire day selling your possessions at pennies on the dollar, a tenth of what you could get on E-Bay, making less than the federal minimum wage for your efforts, but they would shrink in horror from a "free stuff pile".  What is the world coming from that  they place so little value on material possessions that they would give it away for nothing.  Someone will surely complain that you are doing "illegal dumping", even if you tend the pile and fold things back up.  Fortunately for me, I live in a neighborhood with a heavy student population, north of Seattle's University of Washington campus, and such a pile is welcome.  Having purged the house of unneeded things that aren't worth my time trying to sell (unlike my art, which I will find