Yet, I Have All My TeethAnd Indoor Plumbing

I make fun of stupid people. They are legitimate targets of ridicule. And the crazys too. And anyone who I think is too big for his or her britches. I call people out for being ignorant and illiterate. I roll my eyes at poorly spoken or written English, and am a self-professed language snob.

I also can't stand people who can't see themselves, who seem to be the only ones oblivious to their own shortcomings. I refuse to be one of those people.

My project for the long weekend has been to transfer all my blog posts to Word files, because blog sites have been known to vanish into thin air. In doing so, my misspelled words glared back at me. I don't have spell check on the page I write my posts on, so I don't catch all the typos and misspellings. Holy crap, there are a lot of them.

So, it's time for reck...(r e c k...yeah--that's right)oning. I'm owning up to my own idiocy, and here for your literary enjoyment, so that you may bask in your acedemic superiority, are the words I've misspelled over the last six months.

I found the occasional receive written in flagrant disregard of the i before e... rule. And, of course, there were those words where I had either omitted a double consonant, occurred showed up with both Cs but only one R. Or I had padded a word with an extra letter. Occasion is a word I will never spell correctly. I've practiced. Still, it comes out with an extra S.

I realize now that therapeutic has the same tricky eu thing that pharmaceutical has. And that both disastrous and wondrous have dropped the e before the r. Millennia has two ns and preferably doesn't need the extra r. Withdrawal is a form of birth control, and someone describing, in broken English, how Southeners speak, says withdrawl. The word is traipsing, not trapesing.

Guatemalan, ethereal, ideology, vengeance, and dominatrix--I can say these words just fine. But I can't spell them to save my life. Of the lexicon I have butchered to date, I couldn't believe I fucked up cemetery, and for some reason made want a contraction. I added a silent e to smooth, and what I did to conniption, is just unforgivable.

What I couldn't believe as I began to catalogue my many faux mots, were the words I got right. Nihilist, Caesar, unprecipitated, and cannulae, among them. How on earth does cannulae appear effortlessly and perfectly, every letter matching Webster's version, but I insist on placing an apostrophe in want? I don't understand. Oh well. My conscience is clean now. Oafish, but clean.

Bless your hearts, every one of you, who never said a word, but treated me like the intelligent sophisticate I've pretended to be. I have seen the error of my ways, and I encourage you to gloat.

I would.




Making more of an effort to look it up when in doubt,


Cindy