Wednesday, 16 January 2008
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Can I still learn to spell?
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.
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Comments (7)
I was a pretty good speller in my youth too and one year I won the school wide competition and went to the district one. The district bee came down to a spell off between two of us and my competitor was a girl who was the runner up the previous year and favored to win.
After we both spelled a number of difficult words correctly, I got the word "tortoise" and I wasn't sure how to spell it and entered panic mode. After using all the stall tactics I could, I spit out an incorrect spelling and lost the bee.
Nowadays I've become so reliant on spell check, that I'm constantly spelling things incorrectly except of course for tortoise.
Dan, I can totally imagine it -- you using stall tactics, perhaps several pronunciations, and "tortoise? can you use that in a sentence please?" hoping mental images of turtles might shake free the needed insight.
And I'm with you guys on spell check, particularly with google search. I usually just mash the keyboard in approximately the correct manner, and let google fix my search.
@adam Ha ha.
@jeff Yah, Google's spell check on search is a savior. The keyboard on my media computer is broken and I wanted to surf to rotten tomatoes on it the other day so I typed in: "rttn tmats" and got suggested the correct spelling.
Hah. What got me back in 6th grade was "heroic" - this was like the first round word after I had won the county or something with all those hard words.
The problem? At the time, I was playing Heroes' Quest (latest Quest for Glory) on the PC, and there was a section where you had to answer a question about the name of the game you were playing.
"Heroic. H-e-r-o-e ... oh, I mean, -i-c." Him: "Sorry, son, you once you say it, it sticks. Better luck next time."
Damn video games.
@Tim+Marman - Shoulda spend the previous night practicing rather than playing Heroes' Quest... now you'll never know what kind of future you might have had in the limitless field of spelling. :)
hahaha! That's a funny way of remembering a word's spelling (RETRY EVE)...don't feel bad about it - I also forget those words like believe, retrieve.....all the time, if that makes you feel any better...haha!