Happy Hump Day

This is an especially meaningful Hump Day for me because I just made it over a hump that rivals Kim Kardashian’s.

Just when I thought I had nothing left to write about grammar, my editor requested fifty more pages. But I did it, and I sent them off this morning!

I am excited because now I have more time to dedicate to my new Mad Men addiction and to getting back to reading your blogs—sorry, I’ve been MIA this week.

But I wanted to drop in and say hi and to let you know I’ve missed you. Oh, and I also want to tell you about this new religion I’m thinking about joining. I have been reading about it in my students’ critical thinking papers I'm currently grading in which I have them analyze an interview between Bill O’Reilly and Marilyn Manson.

I, of course, watched the interview, but my students are picking up on something I must have missed. Several of them have pointed out that Bill O’Reilly accused Marilyn Manson of being a member of the Church of Satin.

I’m sure some of you are already familiar with this Satin religion. What do the Satinists believe in?

They're Not Gonna Take It

When I first started teaching, I was really excited about the potential of my students’ generation. These young adults showed a propensity to stand up for what they believed in. They weren’t afraid to declare their willingness to object to the status quo. This generation, I thought to myself, is the one that is going to make change happen.

I got the sense of my students’ rebelliousness, not from what they said nor from what they wore, but rather from what they wrote. Nary would I come across an essay in which a student hadn’t written the word defiantly over and over again. Dissent was obviously brewing deep inside of these young men and women.

I soon discovered that it wasn’t actually dissent that was brewing; it was poor spelling skills. You see, my students would misspell definitely as definately, and then Auto Correct would change it to defiantly.

After I realized that their “defiance” was a matter of spelling rather than principle, I began my own little campaign: the If You Are Going to Learn to Spell One Word Correctly, Make It Be Definitely campaign.

However, thanks to Microsoft Word 2010, I can finally put that campaign to rest. Microsoft Word 2010’s Auto Correct changes definately to definitely.

My next campaign: Stop the iPhone’s Auto Correct feature from changing hell to he’ll. Sometimes I do actually intend to reference Satan’s lair. If you’ve ever had to grade a stack of research papers, you’d understand why.

ok, o.K., OKAY!

I used to believe the saying “there is nothing new under the sun”— until yesterday. I was at the market and I heard a woman say to her friend, “I’ve been trying to gain a few pounds.”

No, you didn’t read that incorrectly. A woman actually expressed the desire to GAIN weight.

Next thing you know the penis reduction industry will boom. Children will be throwing tantrums when their parents give them cookies instead of broccoli. Kim Kardashian will have a small, intimate wedding.

Of course, I turned around to see what this woman looked like, and she was definitely thin. But in my experience, even thin women want to be thinner. Women who wear a size 2 want to wear a size 0. Women who wear a size 0 still think they have five pounds to lose. It’s Southern California. She’s lucky there wasn’t a cop around; she might have been arrested.

I can only remember one other time when my concept of reality had been rocked so hard.

I had always assumed words started out long, and then we’d get lazy and abbreviate them. For example, television had been shortened to TV, sexually transmitted diseases to STDs, United States of America to USA, and Puff Daddy to P. Diddy to Diddy.

So imagine how shocked I was when I learned that the word OK started as an abbreviation and then later was lengthened to the word okay.

The origin of OK is still considered a mystery, but the most popular theory is that in 1839 when comical misspellings were all the rage (remember that?), OK stood for Orl Korrect, which was the comical misspelling of All Correct. Soon after, OK became a word of its own and kept the meaning “All Correct.”

I did not know this. Consequently, for years, I have been correcting my students’ OKs and O.K.s with okays.

However, different style guides prefer different expressions of the word. For example, the Associated Press Style Guide prefers OK, the New York Times prefers O.K., and Garner's Modern American Usage prefers okay.

Which expression of the word do you prefer?

Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, or Diddy?

I mean, OK, O.K., or okay.

References:

“Okay vs OK.” Words Between the Spaces. 13 Jan. 2010. Web. 17 August 2011.

The Oscares

In the spirit of tomorrow’s Oscars, I'm thinking about hosting a little awards ceremony of my own. You see, in addition to the normal errors that most of us make, there are some extraordinary performances I've encountered in my time: some that make you laugh, some that make you cry, some that make you gasp in horror. They deserve recognition.

So, without further ado, I'd like to present the nominees for this year’s Oscares:

Nominee #1:

The first nominee exhibits innovation as well as a stunning disregard for spell check:

Hentz, it is important.

The creator of this error seems to have been inspired by a ketchup brand, a rental car company- or perhaps both.

Nominee #2:

Nominee #2 is another unique error. Like hentz, it screams, "Who needs spell check?" Although, this error may even be too intense for spell check to handle. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present Nominee #2:

I had the erg to tell someone about it.

Nominee #3:

Nominee #3 is a sequel. The student made this same error earlier in the quarter, which I pointed out and corrected before returning her essay. Apparently, she didn’t take heed as it resurfaced again this week, causing her instructor to question why she even bothers writing comments if her students don't bother reading them. Here it is for the second time:

We take many things for granite.

Or maybe my student was simply indicating that we mistake many things around us for intrusive, felsic, igneous rock.

Nominee #4:

Now, Nominee #4 is a very dangerous error to make, especially in this post 9/11 world where instructors are required to report any essay content that suggests a student may be a threat. It sounds like the author of Nominee #4 may be attending some kind of summer terrorist camp. Here's a clip:

When summer comes, I usually like going to the beach for bomb fires.

Nominee #5:

Nominee #5 is a light-hearted error. In fact, it's a musical and a 17th century period piece. Everyone clap in 3/4 time to:

It takes me twenty minuets to get to school.

And, the award goes to....

Oh, I can't decide. They are all so wonderful. I need your help. Which error should win the Oscare?

*This was actually a post from last year. But if the movie industry can recycle the same material over and over again, I figure I deserve one repost.

Outrageous

The last thing I want to do is make an ass out of you and me, so I try to be pretty careful.

I learned never to ask a woman, no matter how tiny the rest of her body is compared to her belly, when she is expecting.

I learned never to express joy, no matter how in love she claimed to be two days prior, over a friend’s new relationship. (Oh, he broke up with you last night. Ooops. Um, drinks are on me.)

And I certainly never assume anything when it has to do with the English language.

We can’t even assume our most popular rules are correct.

Remember i before e except after c or when sounded like a as in neighbor or weigh?

What about heir and seize and weird, huh?

And most of the time we simply slap an ly on the end of an adjective to make it into an adverb:

Bad + ly = badly
Clear +ly = clearly
Genuine+ ly = genuinely

Unfortunately, we can’t assume that this is the case for all adjectives. It’s certainly not the case for true. True loses its e before it gains its ly:

True - e + ly = truly

Isn’t that outrageous? It’s truly, truly, truly outrageous!

Indecision 2010

The toughest decision I can imagine having to make is this: what if one day I had to choose between going on a date with Johnny Depp and Clive Owen or one with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?














Can you imagine the agony of having to choose between a night of unparalleled hotness or one of unadulterated humor. Dinner with a side of physical perfection and an English accent or a side of intelligence and wit. It’s even more agonizing than my savory or sweet breakfast dilemma.

When I'm lucky, timing takes care of these tough decisions for me. Sometimes I don’t even feel like savory. And sometimes- like this weekend- I am headed to Washington DC to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity hosted by both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Woo hoo!

So, today, if I were asked to make that difficult choice, I would probably go with Jon and Stephen. I’ll definitely be absolutely smitten after a day of their hilarity, and the three of us in the same city just makes it so convenient. Johnny is probably in France, and I have no idea where Clive is these days. I am nothing if not practical.

I just hope that these people aren’t in DC protesting anywhere near the rally:


If I play my cards right, I’m hoping there will be a PUBIC option.

Misery Loves Company

It was fifth grade science. It was my turn to read aloud. Everything was going quite swimmingly until I messed up and read, “Single-celled orgasm.” At the time, it wasn’t actually that big of a deal. I remember having the feeling that I had mispronounced the word, but I didn’t know what an orgasm was at the time, so I wasn’t really embarrassed.

Cut to a few years later. I’m in some office waiting room and I’m flipping through a Cosmopolitan magazine. It should be called COsmOpOlitan magazine. I not only learned the definition of orgasm, I learned the sexual positions I should be doing to best achieve one and how to have multiple ones. I was mortified. I wasn’t really worried about the other kids in my fifth grade class because they probably didn’t know what one was at the time either. All I could think about was Mr. Wilcox and how, when I said “single-celled orgasm," he must have been stifling his laughter. I imagined that he went home and told Mrs. Wilcox and that I would forever be known in the Wilcox household as the single-celled orgasm girl. He would probably write about it in his memoir.

Well, I’ve realized over the years that I shouldn’t have been that worried. Apparently, saying orgasm instead of organism is a pretty common error. I’ve heard a bunch of other people admit to making the same error.

It always softens the blow a little bit when I find out that I am not the only one who has made a mistake, which might explain why I did what I did yesterday. I can’t believe I am even telling anyone, but, you know, blog content before dignity.

Yesterday, as I was writing something, I blanked out: I couldn’t remember if it was desparate with an a or desperate with an e?

So, I looked it up and realized it was desperate, with an e.

But, that wasn’t all I did. After that, I Googled “most commonly misspelled words” hoping to find that I wasn’t the only one who made this error.

Well, it was not on the list.

But I did come up with a trick so that I will never have to go through that humiliation again. I will use Desperate Housewives to remember to use an e instead of an a because Eva Longoria is in Desperate Housewives and her name starts with an E.

You can use that trick if you want to, but you probably won’t have to since I am apparently the only person in the world who can’t spell desperate.

However, if anyone out there wants to share their misspellings, I could really use the support.

If I Could Turn Back Time

So, since November, I have taken the moral high ground. When the story broke about Tiger Woods' affairs, I told myself that I wasn't going to read about it or discuss it. I felt so bad for his wife that I didn't want to participate in any behavior that would further humiliate her.

But, last night I broke. I read the article "Tiger's Sexts To Porn Start: A Textual Analysis" and read all of his explicit texts to Joslyn James (I was an English major; I can't resist textual analysis.) And, wow! Those were some pretty full-on texts. I mean, some threads he could have maybe covered up if he got really creative, like this one:

Tiger: Sent: 05:46 PM 07/30/2009:
Heading back from the course [1] now.

Tiger:Sent: 05:52 PM 07/30/2009:
How close are you

Tiger:Sent: 06:01 PM 07/30/2009:
I will leave an envelope at the front desk under ms daniels [2]. Your room will be 305. Get settled and let me know when you are ready to see me. I will be i

Tiger:Sent: 06:01 PM 07/30/2009:
n room 201. You can come down the stair well next to your room. Make sure absolutely no one sees you

If this were the only one, maybe he could have gotten away with an, "Elin, it's not what it sounds like. It was my physical therapist. My knees have been acting up again, and I needed him close by, but I didn't want my opponents to know that I was injured. You know how it is, Babe."

But, then it just gets out of control:

Tiger:Sent: 03:37 PM 08/29/2009:
Do you ever hook up with other guys or girls

Tiger:Sent: 03:41 PM 08/29/2009:
You didnt answer the question

Tiger:Sent: 03:43 PM 08/29/2009:
Ok. I would like to have a threesome with you and another girl you trust [7]

Tiger:Sent: 03:48 PM 08/29/2009:
Does that excite you at all or no [8]

At this point, I don't think there's any way to justify an "It's not what it sounds like, Babe," even if it were his physical therapist.

And, as we have probably learned along the way from our own relationship mishaps, usually it is exactly what it sounds like.

Well, there is an exception. Actually, there are three of them:

Could have, Would have, Should have

When spoken aloud, they sound like this:

Could of, Would of, Should of

But, they aren't what they sound like. It's have, not of.

Or, if we want to use the contraction form, it's this:

Could've, Would've, Should've

And, speaking of could've, would've, should've, which three words do you think have been plaguing Tiger for the past few months?

The Oscares

I might as well convert one of my fingers into a red pen. While grading essays, I am constantly adding commas, crossing out commas, changing their to there, adding apostrophes, crossing out apostrophes, and circling misspellings.

But, of course, that’s to be expected. I mean, if high schools were adequately funded and, consequently, students received a proper education, there would be no need for a remedial college English teacher, and I would be out of a job. So, I'm not complaining; I'm just sayin'.

So, in the spirit of being grateful for my job, being grateful that my quarter is wrapping up in a couple of weeks, and in the spirit of the impending Oscars, I'm thinking about hosting a little awards ceremony of my own. You see, in addition to the normal errors that most of us make, there are some breathtaking errors I've encountered in my time: some that make you laugh, some that make you cry, some that make you gasp in horror. They deserve recognition.

So, without further ado, I'd like to present the nominees for the Winter 2010 quarter Oscares:

Nominee #1:
The first nominee is an error that I had never in my thirty-four years of existence encountered until two days ago. It, therefore, exhibits innovation as well as a stunning disregard for spell check:

Hentz, it is important.

The creator of this error seems to have been inspired by either a ketchup brand, a rental car company- or perhaps both.

Nominee #2:
Nominee #2 is another error that I had never encountered until this week. Like hentz, it screams, "Who needs spell check?" Although, this error may even be too intense for spell check to handle. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present Nominee #2:

I had the erg to tell someone about it.

Nominee #3:
Nominee #3 is a sequel. The student made this same error earlier in the quarter, which I pointed out and corrected before returning her essay. Apparently, she didn’t take heed as it resurfaced again this week, causing her instructor to question why she even bothers writing comments if her students don't bother reading them. Here it is for the second time:

We take many things for granite.

Or, maybe she was simply indicating that we mistake many things around us for intrusive, felsic, igneous rock.

Nominee #4:
Now, Nominee #4 is a very dangerous error to make, especially in this post 9/11 world where instructors are required to report any essay content that suggests a student may be a threat. It sounds like the author of Nominee #4 may be attending some kind of summer terrorist camp. Here's a clip:

When summer comes, I usually like going to the beach for bomb fires.

Nominee #5:
Nominee #5 is a light-hearted error. In fact, it's a musical and a 17th century period piece. Everyone clap in 3/4 time to:

It takes me twenty minuets to get to school.

And, the award goes to....

Oh, I can't decide. They are all so wonderful. I need your help. Which error should win the Oscare?

Commitment Phobe?

Who isn’t? Commitment is confusing, complicated, and it stirs up all of those old insecurities: insecurities, for example, that arise when we don’t know if a word has two m’s and only one t, two t’s and only one m, or two t’s and two m’s?

Commitment didn’t make it on this list of most commonly misspelled words in business writing for nothing.

To get over our commitment phobia, all we need to do is figure out a way to remember that commitment has two m’s and only one t. And, since we tend to remember things that resonate with us, here are two different ways to memorize how to spell commitment: one for commitment phobes and one for commitment friends.

• Commitment friends can remember that commitment has two m’s and one t in the following ways:

More movie dates/ fewer TV dinners by ourselves on a Saturday night
More marriage potential/less ticking of the biological clock
More monogamy/less transmission of herpes

• Commitment phobes can remember that commitment has two m’s and one t in the following ways:

More moaning and bitching/ less time to oneself
More meeting the family/ fewer Taco Tuesdays
More missionary position/ fewer threesomes

And then once we memorize how to spell it, maybe we will embrace commitment as much as this guy:



P.S. I am soooo bummed that there is one episode left of Big Love this season. How are they going to tie up all the loose ends in one hour? Is Barb going to have an affair with the cute guy from the casino, is Margene going to have an affair with her new husband, what is J.J. up to, does Bill win the election, will he expose them as polygamists? Aaaaah!

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Oooooh! Brad and Angelina are back in love. Aaaaaaah! The Kardashians are trading happiness for fame. Eeeeeeeeeh! Kelly looks amazing! Yes! Yes! Yes!

Tabloids are my porn. I read my People tucked inside a New Yorker, and if someone finds an In Touch in my room, I get all defensive: “Oh, um, that’s not mine. My friend must have left it here.”

You see, I was an English major and now I'm an English teacher, so I've got a rep to protect- that I read about Elizabeth Bennet, not Elizabeth Hurley.

But, celebrity gossip is this weird addiction that I wish I could stop. It’s not because I feel like I should be keeping up with things more important than the Kardashians; it’s because now when I watch a movie or I listen to a song, I can’t separate it from the artist. I can’t just rock out in my car to "Toxic;" I find myself worrying about Britney’s mental stability. While watching He’s Just Not That Into You, I can’t separate Jennifer Aniston’s character’s plight to find a husband from Jennifer’s own plight. And, ever since Oprah, Tom Cruise is 100% ruined for me.

Oh, why Tom Cruise did you have to turn out so creepy? Why can’t it just be the way it was back in the 80’s when you were quietly hot and rugged:

But, I guess celebrities are people; we just make them out to be more than they really are.

We also do that with the word nowadays; we make more out of it than it actually is.

People are writing nowadays as three words, like this: now a days, but it’s really just one word.

But, before you simply correct yourself and write nowadays as one word, hear me out. I feel the same way about the word nowadays as I feel about John Mayer.

First of all, I am totally sick of reading about him in the tabloids. And not only has his recent Playboy interview confirmed him as a narcissistic dumbass, but was "Waiting for the World to Change" really even that great of a song? Honestly, I'd be fine without him or his music.
Similarly, I could do without nowadays.

First of all, it makes our writing sound a little folksy.

And second of all, it’s unnecessary. For example, let’s take away the nowadays away from this sentence:

Nowadays, John Mayer seems to love the sound of his own voice.

It leaves us with this:

John Mayer seems to love the sound of his own voice.

And since the sentence is in the present tense, we know that we are talking about nowadays, so we can just eliminate it, right?

And, speaking of eliminating things we don’t need: would you like to add anything to the list?

Keepin' It Real

So, as we already know, English is a crazy language. For example, take the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. For the most part, it's great, right? The first twenty-nine letters of the word- no problem. Supercalifragilisticexpialido is pronounced exactly how it looks. Go ahead, try it- I’ll wait.

See?

It's the cious that's the problem.

It should be written shus, right?

But, that's the wacky English language for you: a c that sounds like sh, and iou that makes the same sound as u. And, it doesn't stop there; English is full of letters that take on the sound of other letters and letters that are silent.

One of the worst offenders is words that end ough. Ough is funny in that not only is it full of silent letters, but it also is pronounced differently depending on the word in which it is found. For example, in the word dough, it sounds like an o; in tough, it sounds like uff; and in through, it sounds like ew.

Well, there are certain individuals out there who are sick of our letters trying to be something they are not. Instead of trying to be all fancy and French sounding, they just want our words to keep it real. Therefore, sometimes when I am grading a paper or reading an email, I run into these words:

Tuff

Ruff

Thru

Now, I totally appreciate the sentiment behind this "Keep It Real" campaign, but before we change the spelling of rough, tough and through, we should click on this link to watch a cautonairy tale by this wise man


to see what happens when keeping it real goes wrong:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI2RT1zDVLw

DIYikes

While driving the other day, I saw a motto for a handyman service scrawled across a pick-up truck's rear window that said, “Call us to finish the work your husband started.” Well, that’s a bit sexist, I thought to myself. Who’s to say that the men do all the work around the house? And, in this economy, is it really smart business to limit their customer base to married women with inept and/or lazy husbands? But, after I got all that out of my system, I had to admit to myself that I actually thought their motto was pretty clever because, you know, you always hear about the husband who tries to fix the sink himself but ends up mangling it beyond repair- at least Tim Allen always did on Home Improvement. Sometimes spell check can be like Tim Allen.

So, you know how it goes with spell check: most of the time spell check will simply underline a misspelled word and then we click on the underlined word and it gives us the correct spelling. But, there are those times when spell check is just like the DIY husband that says, “I got this one, Babe,” and it corrects the word itself. I’m sure it means well, but like hubby, sometimes spell check does more harm than good.

For example, take the word definitely. Definitely makes the most commonly misspelled words list as consistently as Paula Abdul makes the worst-dressed list

because we love to spell it like this: definately. Well, when we use an a instead of the i , spell check automatically changes it to defiantly, and we don’t notice because spell check didn’t alert us. And then even if we belong to the tiny minority that does proofread, we don’t notice the error because we tend to see what we want to see instead of what’s there (you know, like we did with that ex all of our friends hated). Therefore, the email to our boss says,” I will defiantly be at the meeting on Tuesday,” like we’ll be staging a sit-in or something.

Spelling

The conditions have to be just right, but when Jupiter is rising in Saturn, the Dow Jones is up 10 points, there’s no traffic on the 405, and Tori Spelling isn't working on a project that is a pun of her name (Wikipedia claims that unchartered terriTori will soon follow in So NoTORIous and sTORI Telling's footsteps), a miracle happens: my students express a genuine interest in improving their writing skills. On this rare and special occasion, the number one question they ask me is how to become better spellers. Unfortunately, I have to give them the same answer I would give Brad Pitt if he asked me how he could get the tabloids to stop talking about his personal life: you’re better off spending your time on a more realistic goal (For Brad, maybe one that includes a razor.)

Of course, this is only my opinion, but I think spelling is like chicken pox: it becomes more difficult to deal with as an adult. Either you read a lot as a kid and consequently picked it up through osmosis, you’re genetically predisposed to putting the right letters in the right places, or, like most of us, you can never remember whether it’s bananna, bannana or banana.

Now, if as an adult you really really want to improve your spelling you can, but I imagine that most people want to be good spellers in the same way I want to learn French, belly dancing and how to cook Thai food- not enough to sacrifice watching my shows after work. Let’s face it: the English language is tough. There are silent letters and exceptions to every rule. What kind of sadist decided that there were to be two m’s in accommodate, but only one m in accomplish, and only one c in acquire?

Now, having said all that, I don’t at all encourage or accept incorrect spelling. I just don’t think we need to become good spellers to spell correctly. I think we simply need to be a little resourceful.

Obviously, we should use spell check. However, I agree with Professor H. Zar’s perspective on it:
“Every semester I am amazed by the number of students who turn in papers full of typographical errors that would have been caught by spending a few minutes with a spell checker. On the other hand, one should not assume that the spell checker alone can guarantee perfect results...”

This excerpt from his poem shows spell check’s limitations:

I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it's weigh.
My checker tolled me sew.

A checker is a bless sing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right awl stiles two reed,
And aides me when eye rime.

So, if we can’t rely solely on spell check yet we don’t know how to spell a word, where do we turn? You probably think because I’m an English teacher I am going to say to whip out your dictionary, but I’d be a hypocrite. I have a giant dictionary on my desk and I can’t remember the last time I opened it.

That doesn’t mean I know how to spell every word. However, when I don’t know how to spell a word, I turn to the one thing that seems to know me better than I know myself: Google. For example, one time I typed Pirates of the Carribean into a Google search (I have this thing for Johnny Depp, not pirates) and Google asked me

Did you mean: Pirates of the Caribbean

“I never remember whether there are two b’s or two r’s in Caribbean,” I said to myself. Then, I clicked on the correct spelling, and I got my Johnny Depp pics.

Hello Lover.

So, now I always leave a Google window open when I’m writing anything, and when I come across a word I am not sure how to spell I just type it into Google and 90% of the time Google will show me how I meant to spell it. For the other 10%, I have to phone my smart friends.

But, for those of you who do truly want to learn how to be a better speller, a good place to start would be logging off of Facebook and picking up a book.