SPELLING IS FOR WEIRDOS
“WEIRD” HAS LONG BEEN ONE of my favorite words, and I’m sure I overuse it. It is one of those words which defy the old “i before e except after c” rule (a rule that applies mostly to words derived from the Latin; I always have to pause before spelling “siege” and “seize” and “niece”). Educated people—friends of mine—have been known to misspell it as “wierd.” I had a traumatic experience with the word in fourth grade. I had completed an assignment for history, which that year was devoted to Ohio. I had attempted to liven it up, at least for me, by writing about eccentrics associated with Ohio. I remember two of them: Johnny Appleseed and Annie Oakley. I titled the project “Weirdos” and printed the word diagonally in capital letters, spacing them out carefully on the cover of the clip binder, starting in the upper left-hand corner. I was so determined to get the ei right that only later did I notice I had left out the r, committing an unsightly handmade typo: “WEIDOS.”
Why should we care about spelling? What is it about orthography—its Greek roots mean “straight scratching”—that ennobles our enterprise? Why should we try to master spelling, especially now, when we have machines to do it for us? Back in the twentieth century, we thought that robots would have taken over by this time, and, in a way, they have. But robots as a race have proved disappointing. Instead of getting to boss around underlings made of steel and plastic with circuitry and blinking lights and tank treads, like Rosie the maid on The Jetsons, we humans have outfitted ourselves with robotic external organs. Our iPods dictate what we listen to next, gadgets in our cars tell us which way to go, and smartphones finish our sentences for us. We have become our own robots.
Some people might wonder why we still need copy editors when we have spell-check. Although it is a pain whenever I want to double a consonant before a suffix, per New Yorker style, and the spell-check prefers the no-frills version—“mislabeled,” say, instead of “mislabelled”—and I have to go back and poke in the extra letter and then put up with a disapproving red line under the word, I would never disable spell-check. That would be hubris. Autocorrect I could do without. It thinks I am stupid and clumsy, and while it’s true that I don’t know how to disable it and I can’t text with my thumbs like a teenager (though I am prehensile), why would I let a machine tell me what I want to say? I text someone “Good night” in German, and instead of “Gute Nacht” I send “Cute Nachos.” I type “adverbial,” and it comes out “adrenal,” which is like a knife thrust to my adverbial gland. Invited to dinner, I text my friend to ask whether I can bring anything, and she replies that the “food and dissertation” are under control. Good news, I guess. I understand to bring wine and not ask anyone the topic of his PhD thesis.
At work, I try to remember to run a spell-check on every piece at some point. It does catch typos. But the reason that the spell-checker will never replace the copy editor is that it doesn’t recognize context and therefore cannot distinguish between homophones, words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings: “peddle” (to sell) and “pedal” (to push with the feet), “horde” (crowd) and “hoard” (stash, treasure), “rye” (bread or whiskey) and “wry” (manner), “tale” (story) and “tail” (posterior appendage), “cannon” (the weapon) and “canon” (the received wisdom), “lead” (the heavy metal) and “led” (past tense of “lead”), let alone “roomy,” “roomie,” “rheumy,” and “Rumi.”