1952 Webster’s Dictionary owned by a friend.
The White House is looking for peach in the Middle East.
Missippi’s literary program shows improvement.
After an office assistant was told to re-do the brass plaque that read THE BORED ROOM, it was speedily changed to THE BROAD ROOM.
Who could possibly make such mistakes?
The culprit is Tutivillus or Titivillus, a demon under Lucifer’s command, who interfered with a scribe’s work, laying a stealthy claw on the monk’s ink well. He was responsible for Deuteronomy 5’s text reading “Behold the Lord, our God, hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse.”
Later Tutivillus haunted printing presses, causing typesetters to make spelling mistakes or to take out words. He triggered the burning of thousands of hand printed King James versions of the Bible because Exodus 20 read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
Back in the 1960’s, high school teachers and later college professors might mark down compositions one letter grade for every spelling error. You would never, ever forget receiving an F, and worst case, a G or an H. Before spell-checking apps, we had to look up how to spell something in a hard back dictionary.
Last week our City Council announced they were postponing the Panning and Zoning Commission meeting. I wished that the Commission would indeed pan the outside developers who whack down all the trees on a property before erecting ugly wear-dated condos without shade.
Why do we miss typos? Because we read only what we think we have written. One professional writer suggests printing and reading text on paper in Comic Sans font to catch our typos.
With newspapers doing anything to save money and promote their profits, proofreaders are the first to go.
Will Artificial Intelligence cast a spell of perfect prose? Probably not because AI is a text predictor. Linguists say that our human brain is far better at seeing patterns, a large app compared to AI. If we only looked, our brain would catch that “Gadlys” Knight in a list of musicians associated with Asheville should be “Gladys” and that the British Guardian newspaper is not spelled “Gaurdian.”
Today the public seems more concerned with policing words, being indignant over “wrong” ones, than in caring how they are spelled. It is even clear that spell-checking programs are seldom used, but unknown to us, the spelling error demon may have corrupted the app anyway. It’s not our fault.
Writing Prompt
Can you remember ever being embarrassed over misspelling a word?
Do you double check your writing before hitting the SEND button or sealing the envelope?
Write a paragraph on why you think correct spelling is important or not so important.
