Every now and then QuionMonkey adds a new link on our blogroll after she’s been up until 4 in the morning. I click on it, find she has exquisite taste in blogs, and then start sending her emails about what I discover as I surf. This time I thought I’d share my enthusiasm with you.
One of the newest additions to our blogroll is Typo Of The Day For Librarians. What a beautiful site. Every day there is a new, commonly misspelled word. (In online catalogs, but also in general, I believe.) Words where letters get transposed (fascimile) or left out (aniversary).
It hasn’t made the list yet, but manger will eventually get there, I’m sure. I see it all the time in email communication at work. (All mangers are expected to pass down this information to their staff members…)
It must be a certain type of person who notices words this way. I know I always have. When I was in third or fourth grade we each wrote a page for a class book on what or who we loved. I wrote about my grandma. Bucky Mulvaney wrote about his horses. One of the sentences in his story read, “My hores eat clookes.” I remember some of the kids laughing that he’d used the word hores (pronounced whores) which I laughed about, too, even though I didn’t know what it meant. Much more hilarious, I thought, was that he used clookes; even this afternoon I said to myself as I passed a package of molasses cookies on the table, My hores eat clookes.
The other blog connection QM made was to Grammar Police. (Grammer, btw, already appeared in Typo Of The Day.) A few days ago, Shawn of Grammar Police did a post on words mispronounced in childhood. She shared an embarrassing incident where she asked her mother what the word episcopal meant, except the word got so butchered in the asking that her mother didn’t know what it was. That led to her mother’s admission that she, too, had one of these words.
I shouldn’t make fun of Bucky. I had (and still have) plenty words of my own. One I’ve been thinking about lately is saloon. I used to spend summers with my grandma and grandpa in a small town in northeastern New Mexico. Grandpa had been a cowboy, and I guess to get some excitement in retirement he went almost every day to the saloon. He’d say he was going grocery shopping, but Grandma would say in a disgusted voice, “Agh, he’s going to the saloon.” Having never been to a saloon, yet having been to the A-la-Mode Salon where Grandma got her hair done, I spent at least two summers wondering why my weathered ol’ cowboy of a grandpa liked going to the saloon every day.
Anyway, thanks QM, for loving words as much as I do, especially when we get them all wrong.
I loved this piece. I made me think of all the words my spell check quietly corrects for me when I type. Some of these words I am learning to spell correctly but others just seem to have become part of the wiring of my brain. Sometimes I wonder if I really could rearrange those synapses in order to fix the problem.
The next image I had was of the vocab books we would study and be tested on weekly. I remember one particular list that introduced me to the words dross and dregs. I remember spending all week trying to find an opportunity to use those words but all I could think of was the examples of smelting and wine making (both of which were not part of my world at that time). Since that time I have found that both can be used to describe the social strata that exists in our society today.
Finally, I remember being in 7th grade English class where my young, attractive teacher was conjugating the verb to break and how the class suddenly broke into laughter when she said, “I am flat busted.” That was not the thing to say to a class of 13 and 14 year old boys and girls.
Thank you for helping to bring the memories out of the words around me.
What a nice trip down memory lane.
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R3: That’s hilarious. I love the flat busted story from 7th grade. I bet people have a lot of similar stories. Thanks for giving me a chuckle this morning. 8)
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You’re welcome, R3, and thank you for sharing your memory. I can just picture your teacher enunciating each word: I-am-flat-busted!
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Great post, ybonesy. And something I think about often as we go down the road on red Ravine. I was talking to someone at the art opening Saturday about editing: catching typos and punctuation and misspelled words. We were talking about writing businesses.
Your examples of misspelled words are good ones. I think that’s why I am drawn to sites like Grammar Police and Typo of the Day. I remember when I first found Grammar Police, I was scared to leave a comment – I was sure I’d have some kind of error in my post!
You know what I’ve found? Words that I misspelled as a kid are the ones I still tend to misspell when I write from wild mind and am not thinking about what I’m doing. I actually have to get a visual picture of the word in my mind sometimes in order to spell it correctly.
It’s like R3 says, my mind is wired the way it was when I learned the word. Strange.
The other point I see in this post – some people are natural editors and can spot errors quickly and efficiently. Some are not. I bet the people that send out memos with manger instead of manager probably know how to spell manager. They just don’t catch it.
Natural editors find great joy in the qualities of perfection required to edit. And I’ve always been a little envious of them. I tend to fall in the other camp – editing is great work for me. But it is one of the structures of good writing and strengthens my writing skills.
The bottom line – good writers are not always good editors. Maybe some have to work at it a little more. And maybe typos are wired into our brains from when we were kids (?). I don’t know if any of this makes sense – but there it is.
Let me know if I have any typos in this post! BTW, thanks for the kudos. 8)
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I just thought of one other thing – some people never learned to type which accounts for a lot of typos. Remember the days of typewriters and typing class? We’d be flipping white typing paper through rollers, erasing with little hard gray erasers, tearing holes in the paper. A lot of students didn’t care or give a hoot about typing class. Now that we have the Internet, I bet they wish they would have paid attention. 8)
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I loved typing. Miss O’Malley with her big teased hair that was out of style in the late 70s. I might have been the fastest except I sat behind a girl named Pamela or Shirley, I don’t remember, who sat with a straight back, never looked at her page, and typed like the wind. She was so fast, she’d hit her carriage return while the next fastest group of us were still three-quarters of the way down the sentence.
Ah, yes, the memories of words.
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Standing in line waiting to get into the gymnasium where my daughter was to perform with her color guard unit I read a sign that said, “Quite while music plays”. I stood there looking at it wondering why it looked wrong when my mind said “Shut up! That’s too funny”. I then scanned the walls to see that there were dozens of these signs all over the building.
No wonder everyone was talking, they didn’t know they were supposed to be QUIET.
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R3: That’s amazing. And the worst, isn’t it? When a typo gets repeated in hundreds of magazines, flyers, and signs. I think mixing up quite and quiet is common. It’s so easy to mistype. I wonder if it’s in the Typo of the Day?
That brings up another point – when you see a typo, do you tell someone at the risk of embarrassing them or yourself?There’s another word that gets misspelled – embarrass. Two r’s, two s’s. Wait, did I spell it right?
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Well, well, well. . .
I just presumed our typing classes of old had been replaced with word processing classes. Apparently, this is not so.
That explains the reason so many of my students CANNOT type a paper to save themselves. Margins? Formatting? Headings?
(And is it just me, or are computers WAY easier to manipulate than even the fanciest of typewriters?)
I must confess most of my “typos” come in the form of copy/paste errors. Try as I might to be careful, I generally don’t get through a month without at least one of my handouts falling victim to a copy/paste error.
I try to convince myself the only reason this happens is because I am responsible enough to revisit and revise my handouts, but I still feel that twinge of embarrassment when I miss something and notice it while going over the item with my class.
—
ybonesy,
I absolutely love this recollection / discussion: what great material. Bucky Mulvaney is just fun to say, and Grandpa the cowboy–get out!
(The place I used to get my hair cut could be described as both salon and saloon.)
Wonderful!
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Many years ago one of my responsibilities was maintaining the vocabulary of the company word processing spell-checker. I’d add certain names, so the spell-checker didn’t pull them up as typo’s, plus add hyphenated terms and terms of art as needed, etc.
Somebody complained about it once, because this word got through: demons6rate.
The darn thing read demons, ok, 6, ok, and rate, and felt they were all fine.
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OmbudsBen–The topic of company vocabulary is *so* rich – I’m going to add it to a list of future posts I want to do. But, yeah, we don’t use demons6rate here either. We do say F2F, though, for “face-to-face,” and 1:1 for “one-on-one.” I’ve noticed a lot of our lingo doesn’t get picked up by spellcheck – maybe we have someone here who does a similar job for us.
And, yes, Shawn, “Bucky Mulvaney” is a great name to say. I almost said B. or Bucky M. (just to protect the innocent), but I couldn’t help myself.
OK, time to quite down…it’s been quiet a day already here in my world.
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Shawn – we have a saloon/salon haircutting place in Alb, too. It’s got a coffee bar and a liquor license. (License is a hard word to remember how to spell, btw.) And an old dentist chair where you sit to get your locks lopped.
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OmbudsBen: that should be part of our Job! What Job? post – maintaining the vocabulary of the company word processing spell-checker. It never occurred to me there was such a job. (Occur – another great misspelled word.) I bet your list of past jobs is a rich one.
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I just have to share this. On WordPress we get an indication of what leads a viewer to our blog. For example, we get a list of the phrases or words people searched on that matched phrases or words in our blog. Here’s one that landed a hit:
how can i say for my manger thanks
:-O
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[…] Related to post My Manger Is In The Saloon. […]
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[…] Related to post?My Manger Is In The Saloon. […]
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