1067 Spelling

Wednesday, January 10, 2006

My ISP seems to have straightened itself out, and the browsers haven't gone down in a while, so whatever was wrong seems to have fixed itself.

I really missed the spell checker when it wasn't working there for a while. I have a small (British) dictionary here in the den, and a huge dictionary permanently open on a stand in the dining room. I really do check one or the other several times a day. I also have French, Spanish, Latin, Legal, Chemical, and Medical dictionaries, plus several other "word" references. Words were one of Jay's interests, too. We would open the dictionary to a random page, and try to stump each other with words. We had small spats over which dictionary, Webster's or Oxford's, was the best.

I have a huge "understanding/reading" vocabulary, but my "speaking/writing" vocabulary is pitifully small and parochial. I'll use the excuse that I see no reason to use a big fancy word that some people may misinterpret when a smaller more common word will do.

That's an excuse, because the real reason is that I can't spell, and I'm never sure of my pronunciation. Which makes sense, because I believe that if you can pronounce a word correctly, you have a better chance of spelling it correctly. (For example, ask someone who pronounces "athletic" with four syllables how they spell it.)

I have particular areas of difficulty:
Long words with double consonants.
Words that end with "el" or "le". I never know which is correct. Label? Lable? Why isn't it like table?
Adding "ed" to a word that ends with "el", double the "l" or not? Sometimes it's yes, and sometimes no, and I can't figure out what the rule is.
Stuff like that.

I do have a learning disability. They used to think it was dyslexia, but I think it's different, having more to do with left/right confusion, and memory. I have a terrible memory. I can't just memorize things, like how a word is spelled. The only way I can remember anything is to understand it. I can memorize a poem, but I can't memorize an item, like a person's name, or the name of a street (I have a specific problem with proper nouns of all types). For spelling a word, I have to know what the etymology is, what the rule is, and then "figure out" how it's spelled, as opposed to remember.

Welcome back, spel chekker.
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