I Can’t Spell (another argument for Modern Technology)
Always been really bad at it. My mother tried. When I was ten, she would sit me down at the kitchen table and lead me through long lists of words, the letters in which I was supposed to remember – in order.
I didn’t.
A teacher in 8th grade once announced, “Mitch, you’re falling by the wayside.” Saving my homework for the ten minutes between breakfast and bus was the proximate cause. But the misspellings with which that homework was usually peppered didn’t help.
And I still couldn’t spell too well when, in 1976, I was hired as a professor at New York University – to teach journalism, at a time when journalists were particularly obsessed with style and spelling rules. (We had whole courses in copy editing.) I remember rushing back to the office on a Sunday because on a note I’d placed in a colleague’s box I had misspelled Rupert Murdoch’s name: “Murdock.” And I once managed to misspell, in an article, not one but both names of the then Standards Editor of the New York Times – the chief copy editor – Allan Siegal.
No, it doesn’t run in the family: both parents, my only sibling and all three of my kids were or are superb spellers. I am not suffering, to the best of my knowledge, from dyslexia. I think the problem is in my ears. I have trouble hearing the difference between a “d” and a “t,” for example. And my brief career in a rock band was probably made even briefer by my inability to tune my guitar. (Had electric tuners been around in 1972, I might indeed have been the next Keith Richards.)
I put a lot of energy into hiding this (minor) disability. I consulted dictionaries, but sometimes couldn’t come close enough to find the word in a dictionary. Instead, I’d have to choose another word. I regularly consulted my wife – who tidied up “dyslexia” here.
These were the days of typewriters. Wite-Out was my friend. Still, often a page had to be retyped because there were too many words, such as “acceptible,” that had proven unacceptable – a white out of Wite-Outs. Nonetheless, somehow, I succeeded in disguising the fact that this journalism professor could not spell.
And I got better, over the years, at seeing misspellings. “Murdock” now looks wrong (though so, alas, does Allan Siegal’s properly spelled name). I can sort of see (though not hear) that something is amiss with “acceptible.”
And in the mid-1990s, technology – gallantly, unexpectedly, miraculously – came to the rescue. With spellcheck (a brand-new word, a brand-new thing) vigilantly monitoring what we then called “word processors,” I could much more easily get by.
Or mostly get by. Spellcheck isn’t perfect. I had to rely on my wife to alert me to the fact that it isn’t “spell check.” What’s with that?
And then, in an email announcing the latest stories on this website, I managed to write: “…just to show we're not adverse to chronicling the dark side of life.” No help from spellcheck there. And a bunch of you noticed. It was not an unfamiliar embarrassment.
Which is why I’m not averse, sometime soon, to turning responsibility for my spelling over to another technology. AI should have enough “I” to spellcheck “spell check,” to help me distinguish between adverse and averse, and maybe, just maybe, to end my embarrassment forever.