Spelling Gaffes

My family was at my house for Thanksgiving where we all ate an inconceivable amount of food. Eventually, the females—except for my mother—all went off to watch Twilight movies, and since I have no interest in sparkling vampires and sexy men, I sat on my couch and started looking for fun posts for my author page. I was looking for grammar and spelling gaffes or grammar Nazi references and found myself chortling (a word I’ve wanted to use for a long time) at what I was reading. I’m sure my parents found my behavior strange, but I actually am good at grammar and spelling because of them. They were both school teachers who emphasized a good education, and I ended up following in their footsteps and became an English teacher which led to becoming an author and the all-important role as a blogger. It just so happens that my ability to laugh at a good grammar joke is something for which I’m proud (unless I snort or shoot snot out of my nose).

Well, I found this poster about there, their, and they’re that I put up on my author page, and I just couldn’t stop laughing about it. 

It got me thinking about spelling errors from my eighth grade students and things I’ve seen on facebook, and I even did a little research to come up with my newest blog. What you will see are some exceptional spelling gaffes, as well as some occasionally sarcastic comments about them (okay, I admit it—I made sarcastic comments for all of them). If you don’t laugh at some of these, you need to watch fewer Twilightish movies and visit The Red Pen more often (hint, hint).

1.       “In the movie, Harold looses a thumb in a work accident.” (Luckily, it only became loose because losing it completely would have been a tragedy. It’s loses.)

2.       “It was nice to meat you.” (I can’t get the picture out of my head of this person happily slapping his new acquaintance with a pork chop. It’s meet.)

3.       “I’m eating flaming young.” (This sounds cannibalistic, immoral, and dangerous to me. It’s filet mignon.)

4.       “Wow, I’m hot. I can’t go through mini pulse at nineteen, can I?”  (I’ve heard a person can have a mini pulse if they’re nearly dead or suffering from hypothermia—but then the person certainly wouldn’t be hot—so since she’s not old enough to be going through a life change, she should call 911 because she’s nearly dead. It’s menopause.)

5.       “Do you think sex can be good without an organism?” (This is truly a profound question, since an organism is a “contiguous living system” such as an animal might have. I think my wife qualifies as an organism, so the answer for me is no. It’s orgasm.)

6.       “He’s my altar eagle.”  (Our national bird is going to be sacrificed in a religious ceremony? It’s alter ego.)

7.       “I have a torn rotary cup.” (If the Rotary Club was missing a cup and you found it in your shoulder, you would definitely need surgery. It’s rotator cuff.)

8.       “She has old timer’s disease.” (This is very non-specific and prejudicial…getting old isn’t a disease; it’s just an unfortunate experience. It’s Alzheimer’s disease.)

9.       “Your dairy air looks rather attractive from my point of view.” (I think this is supposed to be a weird compliment, but I’ve lived near a dairy farm and dairy air smells like manure. Isn’t that ironic? It’s derriere.)

10.   “They said their was no dairy in the yogurt, but I’m certain their was, and I’m lack toe tolerant.” (Forget about the misspelling of “there”—two times—because we all know 50% of the population can’t spell that word. My sincere question is what does dairy have to do with the person’s tolerance of people with missing toes? It’s lactose intolerant.)

11.   “After all the candy I ate, I think I could die of beeties.” (Beeties isn’t even a word—which makes it very difficult to make even a semi-humorous comment—but regardless, I’m certain candy doesn’t lead to death by beeties. It’s diabetes.)

12.   “Obama is the apidimi of what a black man is suppose to be.” (Okay, it’s supposed to be “supposed to,” and the only reason I’m focusing on that is because “apidimi” is spelled so poorly that I can’t even think of how to spell it. My spell check for that remarkable letter arrangement says “epidemic,” so I’m beginning to think bad spelling is an epidemic. It’s epitome.)

13.   “Ladies, do you prefer natural birth or sea sexion?” (That’s definitely a cool, erotic way to spell “section,” but the real question remains—do you prefer natural birth or an unnatural one at sea? It’s C-section.)

14.   “All I could see was his sallow wet.” (Sallow is an adjective meaning unhealthy yellowish color…so I guess “wet” is a noun in this sentence, so the “wet” is a yucky yellow…like from a Mountain Dew spill? It’s silhouette.)

15.   “The valid victorian at my school was pretty much a pot head.”  (Was this stoner smart, or was he really a suitable Victorian? It’s valedictorian.)

16.   “I’m not Willy Wonka. I don’t sugar code things.” (I have watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory because there are no vampires, but apparently Willy was doing a lot of things in secret that I never noticed, including encoding messages in his sweet things. Hmmm. It’s sugar coat.)

17.   “I need a shofar.” (You need a dictionary. It’s chauffeur.)

18.   “Just because I’m white doesn’t mean I can’t have corn roads in my hair, right?” (I think people of all colors should be allowed to have corn roads, wheat streets, and sugar cane lanes. What’s wrong with that? It’s cornrows.)

19.   “Even if I have to wait a year, I’d feel I made it as an aurthur if Oprah read my book.” (Getting Oprah to read your book would definitely be worth waiting a whole year, but what’s an aurthur? It’s author.)

20.   “We just need to teach are children reading, writing, and arithatic.” (And spelling…and the difference between linking verbs and possessive pronouns. It’s our and arithmetic.)

21.   “I’m experienced in all faucets of accounting.” (His favorite is probably the trickle-down effect. It’s facets.)

22.   “I just took it for granite.” (Do people often need granite? Do they sometimes misidentify things as granite? It’s granted.)

If you chortled a couple of times because of my latest blog entry, feel free to join the site, leave a comment, or check out my aurthur page on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/authorJeffLaFerney?ref=hl. I hope you had as much food, family, and fun this Thanksgiving holiday as I did.  :)

Faith. Hope. Life.

Faith. Hope. Life.

My friend, David Barns, passed away. From cancer. At the age of thirty. Gary, Dave’s father was my son’s high school basketball coach. I’d coached against him, I’d cheered for him as a parent in the stands, and I had the privilege of coaching with him. I made a list (which I’m prone to do), and Gary ranks third behind my father and my father-in-law as a person I respect most in my life. And his son died of cancer at the age of thirty.

Dave was the JV basketball coach at my son’s high school. He was a Division I college basketball player at the University of Detroit-Mercy—a walk-on that beat the odds. He treated my son like family and me with complete respect. Less than two years ago, as the basketball season wound down, he started getting headaches and light hurt his eyes. He thought it was from an injury he’d sustained while playing basketball, so he went to get it checked, and there was cancer behind his eye—attached to his brain. He went through chemo and radiation because surgery wasn’t a good option, and he fought. When it seemed he’d kicked it, he got married, and then things turned for the worse, and he passed away just a little more than a week ago.

I happen to have gone over the hill. Mathematically, I’ve spent more years on my career than I have off it, and all those “career” years were occupied teaching in a classroom or coaching on the basketball court or softball field (usually both…sometimes all three). I’ve also been a parent nearly half of my life and between my career and my parenting, I’ve spent a lot of time reminding people to do their best. I teased a bright, sweet student of mine a couple of days ago who read 198 words in one minute on a fluency reading. She didn’t reach 200 and she was short of the 219 of the student who read to me the hour before. She said what she’d done was “good enough.” I said it wasn’t. Coming short of your goal or finishing in second place is not good enough. I’ve been preaching that message for years and years.

Dave Barns’s mantra through his whole ordeal was Faith. Hope. Life. He continued without fail and without complaint to say, “If you have faith, and if you have hope, you can have life.” His father said at the funeral that Dave was never satisfied with second best. Unless he was the best, it wasn’t “good enough.” Throughout his losing battle with cancer, Dave reached out to others and gave THEM faith and hope. He lost his own mortal life, but the life he led will live on. Whether it’s by memories, shared experiences, inspiration, or admiration, those that knew David Barns were touched by his life. I was touched by his life.

Dave left behind a loving wife, two fantastic parents, and two adoring sisters, but he also left us with an example of faith, an illustration of hope, and a model of life lived to the fullest. By passing away at thirty years of age, it doesn’t seem like he’d had a “good enough” life, but for a thirty-year-old, his example of never giving in to the belief that second place was good enough will be a lasting reminder and inspiration to me, a writer who will never be satisfied just to be finished. My desire to be exceptional has been ramped up another degree in recognition of a young man who was described by the man I look up to as his idol and best friend. I, personally, am stunned that the faith and hope that I had in his recovery didn’t lead to a spared life. But then I attended the funeral home and funeral and walked away a believer that when one has faith and hope, he gives of his life—to others, which in Dave’s case is a life worthy of admiration and a life of inspiration. No, reading 198 words isn’t “good enough” and what I’m doing with my life and with my writing also isn’t “good enough.” My student has more, and so do I. I’m just sorry I had to lose a friend to relearn a lesson I thought I had always been teaching others. Faith. Hope. Life. That would be something that’s “good enough.” Goodbye, David Allen Barns, but thank you for the example of a life well-lived.

Numerology

I was recently asked what are the rules for writing numbers in formal writing. The question set of a spark of curiosity which flamed into a fire, and the end result is another blog entry. The rules are first…the application follows. 

1.       Any one-word number should be written out. Two-word numbers may be expressed in figures. That is, you should write out eight or thirteen or seventy, but if you choose, you may use the numerals for 36. I, for one, will almost always choose to write out numbers in formal writing unless it is a dollar figure, a date/year, a time, a Bible verse, a decimal, or a huge or wordy number.

2.       Don’t start a sentence with a numeral. Make it “Twenty-one years ago, I choked on a Skittle” not “21 years ago….” That means you might have to rewrite some sentences: “Readers bought 121 copies of Bulletproof the first day” instead of “121 copies were bought the first day.”

3.       Centuries and decades should be spelled out. Use the Eighties or Nineteenth Century.

4.       In formal writing, you should spell out the percentage like “I don’t get fifty percent of my royalties,” but for decimals, you’ll have to write the numerals—unless they start a sentence or a quote. One out of every 7.7 people in the world has a facebook account.

5.       Rounded numbers over a million are written as a numeral plus a word. Use “There are over 526 million daily active facebook users.” If you’re using an exact number, you’d write it out, of course—526,000,212.

So let me apply a few of these rules in my writing (after all, if I don’t, you just read a very boring blog entry). I’m curious if you have ever wondered how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a Tootsie Pop? I, oddly enough, was curious, and believe it or not, there’s a website dedicated to that very question…and a discussion forum as well (it sounds like a great way to spend some of your spare time, don’t you think?). I actually found the following quote on the Tootsie Pop website: “This is one of the most profound questions ever posed to humankind and animal alike.” The “ever” part kind of caught my eye…and, well, the part about animals posing this question too. Like a chipmunk and his buddies are standing around counting: “That’s 22,101…22,102….You can do it, Chip, and soon we’ll have answered one of the most profound Twentieth Century questions our species has ever posed.” Here’s another interesting quote: “What you have to do is measure the amount of saliva you produce per lick, measure the volume of the Tootsie Pop, find the amount each lick your saliva takes away from the pop, and divide that much by the total volume of the Tootsie Pop.” So I did the math…twice. I got fourteen once and 902 the other time. So here I was, pleased with myself for coming up with such scientifically accurate data when I ran upon this third quote, reminding me that my data could be flawed if I didn’t consider “acidity of saliva, coarseness of the tongue, pressure per square inch that the tongue is applied to the surface of the tootsie pop, ambient temperature, and the age of the tootsie pop.” So that is when my head exploded, and I unintentionally bit down on my pop after just 112 licks, and what do you know? There was the center tootsie roll. One hundred twelve is the answer.  

So there you are. You know new rules, you’ve discovered a cool new web site, and you have the answer to one of the most profound questions ever posed. It’s been a good day at The Red Pen.

Auto-Correct and Spell Check

Smart phones are awesome. How did we ever survive without all the information they provide at our fingertips? They even correct our spelling for us because, of course, our smart phones know what we want to type even better than we do. At least they think they do--because they’re so smart. A few days ago, I texted my wife and made a smart-alecky comment, followed by the all-important initials jk because, well, I was just kidding. My auto-correct apparently thought I was much more serious than I did, so it auto-corrected to JFK—capital letters and everything. Now, why would I bring John F. Kennedy up? And why would my smart phone think I was talking about him? Was he a smart aleck? Have I ever brought him up before? A friend mentioned the other day that she used the word blah in a text because she was “having a bad day.” It was auto-corrected to Budapest. I got a good laugh out of that, but it was nothing compared to what happened last night. After the Tigers/Yankees playoff baseball game, I texted to a friend that Jeter (Yankee shortstop, Derek Jeter) broke his ankle. Jeter was auto-corrected to heterosexual. I kid you not. My smartphone thought I wanted to say that “heterosexual broke his ankle.” I seriously wasn’t thinking about his sexual preferences; I was thinking about a bone near his foot.

All the above was just introduction, though, to what I really have on my mind about spelling. There are two words that are so commonly misspelled, that, as the wielder of the red pen, I feel it is my duty to straighten things out.

1^st word:  a lot—a lot is two words. I find it interesting that an older version of my Word program ALWAYS underlined alot, indicating it was spelled wrong, but the correction option was allot instead of a lot. My newer version actually fixes the word now and puts the space that belongs. There is no argument about a lot being two words. It just is.

2^nd word: all right—all right is always two words too. But unlike alot, alright is NOT corrected by the Word program, nor is it underlined as an incorrect spelling. Hmmm. Interestingly, the Microsoft Word spellchecker will not highlight alright as an error, but it will also not suggest alright if you spell it incorrectly (for instance, alrite).  Microsoft seems to be sitting on the fence with regard to alright being accepted as standard. I UNDERSTAND it when people say that our language is changing, but what I don’t understand is WHY. Is it because of laziness? Lack of education? I read somewhere that all right is the most commonly misspelled word in the English language (not by number of misspellings but by the consistency of misspellings). 

I’m going to just use some common sense here. I’ve looked at source after source that says that alright is the misspelling of all right. They say that alright is “informal” and that it is “gaining a shadowy acceptance in British English” or “alright is a nonstandard variant of all right.  Even though alright is becoming more acceptable, it is best avoided” or “generally, most editors and teachers don’t think alright is all right” or “alright continues to be looked on as illiterate and unacceptable and consequently it ought never to appear in serious writing” or “alright’s interdiction is as pure an example as possible of a rule without a reason” or “still, even though alright is closing ground on all right, the latter is never wrong and the former is still considered problematic by some” or  “all right  should always be used in more formal, edited writing” or (finally) “if you cannot avoid all right or alright, then opt for all right. Using alright, especially in formal writing, runs a higher risk that your readers will view it as an error. It is far more difficult to justify alright than all right.” One source simply suggested avoiding the word (or words) altogether.

Here’s my point since I’m supposed to make one. When I see the words “problematic…non-standard…informal…illiterate…unacceptable…best-avoided…a rule without a reason…and hard to justify,” I see a problem. And when I see that in “serious writing” and “edited writing” the expectation is to use all right, and that all right is “never wrong,” I tend to become all logical and determine that I will always use all right. 

All right? I’m not JFKing. I’m not having a Budapest day. I’m serious. As serious as a Derek heterosexual broken ankle.