Apparently, I originally learned to spell with the Letter People.  As a mandatory matter, I participated in middle school spelling bees, won the class-wide “primary” and usually took second-place to my best friend Reid Turner.  While I remember very few specific incidents from elementary and middle-school, I still recall vividly the crushing defeat in the cafeteria-turned-spelling-bee-stage when I failed to spell the simple word, “neither.”  My spelling technique is prominently phonetic, and secondarily by visual recognition.  My Achilles’ heel was, and continues to be, this “i before e, except after c, …” nonsense. 

While ”neither” successfully took a prominent place in my memory, there are a handful of other words that did not.  Perhaps the worst member of this set is the word “retrieve.”  Every time this word comes up, I instantly recognize the fact that I don’t know how to spell it, and fail to recall the correct spelling.  Is it retreive?  Or is it retrieve?  Why am I not capable of this simple recollection?  I’m beginning to wonder, can I still learn to spell, or did that phase of life end in the cafeteria circa 6th grade?

To patch up this egregious flaw in my brain, I’ve decided on an alternate technique.  Retrieve is now RETRY EVE, and since there’s no Y in retrieve, the correct spelling becomes RETRIEVE.  Strange, that I had to resort to such extreme measures.