Category Archives: Spelling

In the news (Feb 7)

That Gerund Is Funky …

Language and usage in the news this week: an unfortunate subtitle fail by the BBC, an unusual style guide, a Superbowl ad that needed an edit, and further discussion about just how important French really is. Plus, this week’s weird word of the week …

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Oops! In a subtitling blunder, the BBC rang in the Chinese New Year by welcoming its viewers to the “year of the whores”, as The Independent gleefully reported.

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Continuing an ongoing argument about the importance of French and whether it’s a language in decline, Zach Simon in the Huffington Post writes a rebuttal to John McWhorter’s piece in The New Republic entitled, “Let’s Stop Pretending That French is an Important Language.” As Simon points out: “As the 9th most-spoken language in the world, it’s not as though French is going to go the way of Cherokee anytime soon.”

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One of my favorite articles of the year so far is this critique – an amusingly positive one — by The Guardian of Buzzfeed’s style guide, which the internet giant decided to share with the world this week. More on style guides are to come in an upcoming Glossophilia post.

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“Less bottles”? Really? Shouldn’t she have said “fewer bottles”? As Slate reported, Scarlett Johansson’s SodaStream ad could have done with a good edit.

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This week’s weird word of the week:

Callipygian: adjective: having beautifully proportioned or finely developed buttocks. From the Online Etymology Dictionary: “1800, Latinized from Greek kallipygos, name of a statue of Aphrodite at Syracuse, from kalli-, combining form of kallos “beauty” + pyge “rump, buttocks.” Sir Thomas Browne (1646) refers to “Callipygæ and women largely composed behinde.”

Catching zeds, and the language of slumber

When and why did we start using zzz to refer to sleep? How long have we been catching zeds (or what Yanks call zees), and since when have we been getting our 40 winks?

The OED lists one definition of z (“usually repeated”) as “used to represent the sound of buzzing or snoring”, and it was indeed a case of onomatopoeia that first linked the letter z — or multiple zzzzzzs — to sleeping by approximating the sound of snoring. The American Dialect Society’s Dialect Notes, published in 1918, lists “z-z-z” as “the sound of whispering or snoring, and 1919’s Boy’s Life, the Boy Scouts’ yearbook, gives “Z-z-z-z-z-z-z” as the title of a joke about that most supersonic of sleep sounds. This onomatopoeic use of z’s — which later came to signify, more generally, the state of slumber — was popularized by its use in early comic strips and comic books, for example in Schulz’s “Peanuts” cartoon series. In fact, a single Z in a speech bubble is enough nowadays to indicate that a character is asleep, and this is no longer confined to just the English language: as Wikipedia explains, “Originally, the resemblance between the ‘z’ sound and that of a snore seemed exclusive to the English language, but the spread of American comics has made it a frequent feature in other countries. An exception to this is in Japanese manga, where the usual symbol for sleep is a large bubble coming out of the character’s nose.”

And why “40 winks”, meaning a short sleep or nap? It’s not clear where or when the actual expression originated, but the number 40 is known to have been used historically to signify a great or indefinite number — hence the Biblical “40 days and 40 nights” and other numerous references; as argued in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia,” edited by James Orr in 1915, “it may have originated, partly at any rate, in the idea that 40 years constituted a generation or the period at the end of which a man attains maturity, an idea common, it would seem, to the Greeks, the Israelites, and the Arabs.” Add the informal meaning of wink as a very short period of time, especially in the context of lack of sleep (as in, not being able to “sleep a wink”), and suddenly “40 winks” makes perfect sense. The Online Etymology Dictionary attests the expression “40 winks” from 1821, and speculates that its early use might have been associated with, and perhaps coined by, the eccentric English lifestyle reformer William Kitchiner M.D. (1775-1827).

Other colloquial words and expressions for slumber are cat nap (noun), to doze or doze off (verb), to nod off (v), shut-eye (n), snooze (v & n), and going bo-bos. Cockney Rhyming Slang gives us soot (Sooty and Sweep = sleep) and Bo Peep — the latter possibly giving rise to the suggestion, cooed persuasively and desperately to British babies, of “going bo-bos”…

“Goodnight, sleep tight, and don’t let the bed-bugs bite.” Tight in this context refers not, as some contend, to ropes tied tautly across early bedsteads, but instead to the adverb tightly, defined by the OED as “soundly, properly, well; effectively”; indeed, that dictionary’s first definition of tight itself is “soundly, roundly; = TIGHTLY 1. Now chiefly in colloq. phr. (good night) sleep tight, a conventional (rhyming) formula used when parting for the night or at bedtime.” The bed-bugs can probably speak for themselves.

To Sleep
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,
Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.
— by John Keats

TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Dec 27)

As 2013 draws to a close, we’ve got lots to celebrate about it — like the use of the word selfie, and other words of the year. The Russians haven’t just banned discussions about homosexuality: they also won’t let anyone mention obscene terms for genitals or women of easy virtue. The Church gave a nod to Mexican languages; the Finns don’t like the way iPhone is spelled. And we learned some important new facts: like the words for horse-eating, 3-letter extensions to words in Scrabble, and French kissing in France …

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What do selfies, Suarez and Seamus Heaney have in common? The same as Bieber, bitcoins and Breaking Bad . . . They all appeared in “top words of 2013” lists. “PRIVACY. Selfie. Geek. Science. Four dictionary publishers each selected one of those words as its word of the year for 2013. But it’s tough to catalog the preoccupations of the year in a single word. There were many flying around that seemed to capture a moment, an emotion, a thought, a new way of doing or describing things, or the larger zeitgeist. Some were new, some not so new, but they all seemed to say something about the times. Here are a few …”, the New York Times reported …

Time magazine looked more closely into Oxford’s actual word of the year, which is captured — literally — in James Franco’s pic above …

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The Russian media has been given four categories of swear words that must never appear either in articles or in readers’ comments, in print or online. Newspapers and websites that fail to comply could lose their licenses. The list of unprintable words was compiled by Roskomnadzor (Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications) and among the categories of banned words are “obscene terms for a woman of easy virtue”. RT has the story.

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Mexico’s indigenous languages get a nod from the Church. The BBC has the story …

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According to Cult of Mac, Finland’s linguistic authorities — the Institute for the Languages of Finland, which rules on correct spellings, loan words and usages as the Finnish, Swedish, Romani and Sami languages develop — has decreed that the correct Finnish usage of iPhone is not iPhone, but rather Iphone or I-phone. You tell ’em, Finland.

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Finally, thanks to the BBC’s list of “100 things we didn’t know last year”, we now know 22 fun facts about words and language that we didn’t know in 2012:

Horse-eating is called Hippophagy.

“Russian flu” got its name because of the Cold War rather than because it originated in Russia.

William is the surname that has decreased the most since 1901.

Haribos are so-named because of founder Hans Riegel and his hometown Bonn.

South Africa was included in the BRICS as it made for a better acronym than Nigeria.

“Lucifer” and “.” (full stop) are banned baby names in New Zealand.

Birmingham City Council blocks the word “commie” from incoming email.

Using “don’t” and “won’t” correctly in online dating messages boosts response rates by more than a third.

The French call a walkie-talkie a talkie-walkie.

Until recently the US Navy had a requirement that all official messages be sent in capital letters.

“God’s bones” was the sweariest expression in medieval times.

The French had no official word for French kissing… until now. It’s “galocher”.

Ampersand was once an actual letter which followed the letter Z in the Latin alphabet.

The first recorded incorrect use of the word “literally” was in 1769.

Polyamorous people have invented a word to indicate the opposite feeling of jealousy – compersion.

Glaswegians are starting to sound like Cockneys because of EastEnders.

In Scrabble, a Benjamin is a three-letter extension to the front of a five-letter word.

The word “get” went out of fashion in books between 1940 and the 1960s.

Amazon’s original name was to be Relentless – and the URL relentless.com still redirects to the company website.

John Wayne coined the phrase “the Big C” to avoid naming cancer.

Americans pronounce gifs as “jifs”.

A long-term lover is known as a “small house” in Zimbabwe.

TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Dec 13)

Words and language in the news this week: a sign language interpreter meltdown; Yankee driving lingo; two tweets that could have used an edit; and Cormac McCarthy on punctuation …

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When the sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in Johannesburg started to “sign rubbish”, complaints started to flood in from deaf viewers around the world. According to the BBC, “Wilma Newhoudt-Druchen, the country’s first deaf female MP, tweeted: ‘ANC-linked interpreter on the stage with dep president of ANC is signing rubbish. He cannot sign. Please get him off.'” Thamsanqa Jantjie, the rogue interpreter, explained that he had a schizophrenic episode and started to hear voices in his head.

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BBC America’s Mind the Gap blog published a very useful British hitchhiker’s guide to understanding America’s driving lingo. From jaywalking to tailgating, you can get your Yankee drive-speak on.

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Slate.com’s Lexicon Valley blog argued a case for the Oxford comma by publishing a Sky News tweet reporting on the Mandela memorial. “Top stories: World leaders at Mandela tribute, Obama-Castro handshake and same-sex marriage date set…” was the tweet. “A handshake and a proposal” was Slate’s interpretation of it.

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Cormac McCarthy takes a minimalist approach to punctuation. “James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.” Open Culture examines McCarthy’s three punctuation rules and how they all go back to Joyce.

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When the University of Michigan found out that it was ranked number 12 in a world ranking, it sent out this tweet:

Ooops! Not so hot in the spelling rankings, it seems …

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Possessive waffling

So, why is it called Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream – and not Ben’s & Jerry’s? It’s what’s known as a joint possessive: because the ice cream is owned jointly by Ben and Jerry, they need only one possessive — ie. one apostrophe — between them. And this rule is good for limitless numbers of owners. Let’s say Jack Hypothetical joined the company and claimed his stake in their delicious branded FroYo: the three ice-cream men would still have to make do with just one apostrophe: Ben & Jerry & Jack’s FroYo.

Now, assuming that Ben & Jerry don’t live together, when it comes to talking about their homes we refer to Ben’s and Jerry’s houses, and to their respective loved ones as Ben’s and Jerry’s families. That’s not to suggest that they each have multiple properties or that either of them is a bigamist, however, and to be sure to avoid any confusion or ambiguity with regard to that plural matter, it’s sometimes wise to just reword the phrase. But giving them each their own possessive apostrophe clarifies that the items are separately owned — what’s Ben’s is Ben’s and what’s Jerry’s is Jerry’s — whether in single or multiple form.

That’s joint possessives covered. Double possessives are a different thing — and, just to confuse things further, they come in two forms.

First, going back to Jack Hypothetical: let’s say he started out as a friend of Ben’s. Looking at that sentence, I’ve twice indicated Ben’s possession of Jack (as a friend): first by saying “friend of” (with the of suggesting ownership), and then by giving Ben an apostrophe and an “s”. Why do we sometimes repeat the possessive sense like this? There’s no real reason, except that it’s been done for centuries and it’s generally accepted in standard English. In the same way that we say “it’s a habit of mine” (and not “it’s a habit of me” or “it’s a habit of I“), we naturally use the double possessive. In The Careful Writer (1965), Theodore M. Bernstein noted that “grammarians have argued over the origin and nature, but not the validity, of the double genitive with the fervor of hot-stove league fans rehashing a Word Series play.”

Now, what if we want to ask about Ben & Jerry’s ice cream’s calories? That seems a fair question, if a little awkwardly phrased (and a bit of a party pooper, if you ask me). This is the other form of double possessive: when something is owned by something that is in turn owned by something else. By far the best way of avoiding this sort of double possessive is to reword it: let’s ask instead about the calories of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. But note that we don’t use the earlier form of double possessive in this case — ie. we don’t inquire after “the calories of the ice cream’s”, whereas we might inquire after that amazing FroYo idea of Ben’s (or Jerry’s? or both?). Only people and animate objects have the privilege of the extra possessive, it seems: not even ice cream warrants it. But please don’t ask me to explain why …

I know: I’m waffling now — but not in the American sense, which Oxford Dictionaries defines as “failing to make up one’s mind”. Ben & Jerry’s “Waffling?” poster uses some tasty word-play here, pointing out our failure to choose which flavor of ice-cream to put in their waffle cones. So yes, a lot of waffling goes on in North America’s Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream stores. But this particular play on words would be lost on most Brits, to whom waffle means something different: “to speak or write, especially at great length, without saying anything important or useful”. Waffle seems to be what I’m doing and spewing here — since it comes in both verb and noun form.

Here ends this waffling of mine. A triple possessive is calling me: my Ben & Jerry’s Ron Burgundy’s Scotchy Scotch Scotch…

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TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Nov 15)

This week in the news: Authors raise money for the Philippines typhoon appeal; The Guardian brings us the Letter H; a kerning fail at the hardware store; and is there such a thing as a universal syllable?

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Authors for the Philippines is an online auction of books and book-related items (including everything from dedications to author visits, manuscript critiques to signed books) to raise money for the Red Cross’s Typhoon Haiyan Appeal. Please bid enthusiastically.

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The British hardware chain store B&Q seems to have a festive font problem. It’s all about the kerning. The Poke brought this to fuckering light …

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Michael Rosen writes in The Guardian about the letter H: “debates about power and class surround every letter, and H is the most contentious of all. No other letter has had such power to divide people into opposing camps.”

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Is there a syllable that everyone recognizes and understands around the world and across cultures? Jennifer Schuessler reports in the New York Times that there is, “Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands announced that they had found strikingly similar versions in languages scattered across five continents, suggesting that “Huh?” is a universal word.

Wordy board games

Game-playing is and always has been a central part of the human experience and is as vital to – and reflective of – a society’s culture as music, dance, literature or the other arts. Chess, checkers (known as draughts in British English), and backgammon are board games that date back thousands of years — and they weren’t even the first of their kind. Senet, found in Predynastic and First Dynasty burials of Egypt c. 3500 BC and 3100 BC respectively, is the oldest known board game (four sets were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb); other such forms of ancient entertainment were Mehen, from Predynastic Egypt; Go, originating in China; Patolli, originating in Mesoamerica played by the ancient Aztec; and Pachisi and Chaupar, ancient board games of India. What these games share is the goal of outwitting one’s opponent by strategically seizing points, property or territory using a process or combination of counting, logic, or luck.

Board games predated the development of writing and literacy, and although it’s no surprise that language eventually found its way into the world of parlor entertainment, it seems to have taken its time, only joining the fun in the 19th century when board and parlor games started to develop and broaden to amuse and entertain the whole family rather than just the older, nerdier teenagers and adults. Words in all their glory — whether strutting their spellings, their definitions, or their usage in expressions and phrases — now form the basis of a number of popular modern games that have been enjoyed by humans large and small over the past century.

Incidentally, it’s interesting to note that board games are given “publication” dates: I didn’t realize that games were “published”, like books — and it seems especially strange when the games in question have nothing to do with language.

Here are some of the more popular and enduring wordy board games, with their tag-lines and a very brief description of their rules and origins. Any others I’ve missed?

Scrabble:

“Crossword game”: The grand old man of word games: two to four players score points by placing tiles — each bearing a single letter — onto a board in such a way that the tiles form words, crossword-style. The words must be defined in a standard dictionary.

The first version of Scrabble was created in 1938 by the American architect Alfred Butts under the name “Criss-Crosswords”, as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko. In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut, bought the manufacturing rights in exchange for giving Butts royalties on sales. Brunot made some slight changes to the board, simplified the rules, and changed the game’s name to “Scrabble”, which means “to scratch frantically”. Legend has it that Scrabble‘s big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of Macy’s, played the game on vacation and placed a large order for his department store …

Probe:

“The game of words”: Reminiscent of the simple two-person game Hangman, up to 4 players try to guess a word chosen by another player by revealing specific letters. Probe was introduced in 1964 by Parker Brothers.

Boggle:

“The 3-minute word search game”: Using a plastic grid onto which lettered dice are shaken and settled (with a single letter facing up), players search against the clock for words that can be spelled from adjacent cubes, ie. those neighboring each other horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. Invented by Alan Turoff in 1972 for Parker Brothers. Turoff’s wife was also a toy designer, and they exchanged their marriage vows to the tune of “Babes in Toyland”.

Scattergories:

2 to 6 players score points by thinking of names – unique among players in the particular round — of items in different categories with a given initial letter, all against the clock. Published in 1988 (the designer seems to be unknown).

Taboo:

“The game of unspeakable fun”: The object of the game is for a player to get her partner or team to guess the word on her card by defining it without using the word itself or any of the five additional words listed on the card. Taboo was designed by Brian Hersch and published in 1989 by Hasbro.

Apples to Apples:

“The game of hilarious comparisons”: From two decks of cards — adjectives and nouns — a player (referee) selects an adjective card; the other players choose and play from the noun cards in their hands the nouns that best match the chosen adjective. The referee then chooses the noun card that appeals most to them and awards the card to whoever played it. Designed by Matthew Kirby and Mark Alan Osterhaus, it was published in 1999 by Out of the Box publishing.

Banagrams:

“The anagram game that will drive you bananas!”: 2 – 8 players arrange their own tiles into a grid of connected words faster than their opponents. The winner is the first to complete a word grid after the pool of 144 tiles has been exhausted.

Abraham Nathanson, a Rhode Island artist, invented Bananagrams at the age of 76; the game debuted at the 2006 London Toy Fair. According to the New York Times, in its obituary for the inventor after his death just four years later, Nathanson “hit on the idea for Bananagrams while playing Scrabble with his grandson and chafing at the slow pace of the game. ‘We need an anagrams game so fast, it’ll drive you bananas.'”

Pictionary:

“The game of quick draw”: The word-guessing game is played in teams, with players trying to identify specific words from their teammates’ drawings. Pictionary was invented by Robert Angel with graphic design by Gary Everson and first published in 1985 by Angel Games Inc.

The Origin of Expressions:

“The origin of expressions: Phrases – Fakery – Finesse – Fun”: Players receive a common everyday phrase, such as “Baker’s Dozen,” and write an explanation for the phrase’s origin. Players try to convince the others that their own origin is the true one. Players vote for the most plausible origin. A recent game, published in 2007 by Discovery Bay Games, the designer is uncredited.

The Russian president: a man of many …

This post might be a little controversial — and not because of the inherently controversial nature of its subject, Vladimir Putin.

In a recent conversation about the Russian president* that took place among three European friends — a Brit who lives in America, a Dutchwoman who also lives in America, and a Brit who lives in France — there was major disagreement. And it wasn’t about Putin’s politics: our opinions on that subject were pretty much in synch. What we couldn’t agree on was how to pronounce his name. Between the three of us, there were three different pronunciations: POO-tin, PYOU-tin, and Poo-TEEN.

The French don’t just say his name differently from the rest of us: they spell it their own way. In most of the Western world in which the Roman alphabet is used, the president’s name is transliterated as and spelled “Putin”. But not so in France. There, for what might be either linguistic or diplomatic reasons, they spell his name “Poutine”, making it rhyme with routine when said aloud. The French might argue that their pronunciation of the more commonly spelled “-in” at the end of his name bears no resemblance to the “-tyeen” that the Russian alphabet prescribes, and therefore they needed to find another transliteration. But what’s just as likely is that the French felt uncomfortable pronouncing Putin’s name in the way most Frenchmen would be inclined to do if the name kept that spelling. Said aloud, it would be a homophone of putain: the French word for prostitute or whore. Not a good sound for a head of state. Especially a big state like Russia. So Poo-TEEN it is in France. Below is how the New York Times reported on this curiosity back in 2005.

But it’s the first syllable of Putin’s name — not the second — that separates the Brits from the Yanks.

This morning on American Public Media’s Marketplace radio program, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell (a Brit) was talking about Brand America and how the brand may have been damaged of late. That’s another story altogether, but during the conversation, in his cut-glass public-schoolboy accent, Sir Martin very clearly pronounced the Russian president’s name “PYOU-tin” [about 1.46 minutes in], inserting that “y” sound after the “p” and before the “u”. In the same way that we all pronounce the words pure, punitive, putrid, puny, pupil, and other words beginning with “pu” (except for those that have the open “uh” sound, like punish, puss, or publish), most Brits — at least those on the street — tend to do what Sir Martin does, inserting that ‘y’ sound. However, Americans say “POO-tin”. This is in keeping with a general rule described in an earlier Glossophilia post about the pronunciation of loan words in Britain and America: that Brits generally pronounce them according to what’s prescribed by the English spelling rather than that of the native language, whereas Americans tend to simulate the original pronunciation as much as possible. The Russian spelling of the President’s surname is Путин, which translates phonetically as “POO-tin”; if it were spelled ПЮтин, the Russians would call their leader “PYOU-tin”. (I used to speak some Russian as a kid, and I remember those two “oo” and “you” letters.) So the Americans are approximating the Russian sound, but the Brits are pronouncing it the way they themselves spell Vlad’s last name. Interestingly, British broadcasters — most notably the BBC — pronounce Putin’s name as the Russians and Americans do. (In fact, the BBC published a special guide on how to pronounce his name correctly, pointing out the common error of saying “pew” instead of “poo”.) So at least we’ve got it right officially in Great Britain. Have you ever heard Rasputin — the Russian dude with the beard and the eyes — pronounced Rass-POO-tin? Probably not, wherever you come from. A quick trot through YouTube suggests that it is pretty universally pronounced Rass-PYOU-tin, even by the Americans. Go figure.

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The New York Times delved into the French spelling and pronunciation of the Russian president’s name back in 2005:

“In France, they do the right thing by Putin’s first syllable, spelling it Pou (as in the French ou, ”where,” and fou, ”crazy”). But their difficulty arises in that second syllable, tsyin, which we approximate with in. The French have a linguistic problem that may also be a diplomatic problem. It’s the affair of the spelling of in. …

“But other, more conspiratorial linguists suggest that the spelling of Putin in English would be pronounced as putain in French — that is, sounding close to pew-TANH.

“Putain, in French, means ”prostitute; whore,” or in current correctese, ”sexual-services provider.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the probable source, slightly corrupted, of the U.S. slang term poontang, a derogation of women as a means of sexual gratification. Hence, the rejection of the English spelling of Putin and the switch to Poutine, pronounced poo-TEEN. Small wonder that French arbiters of usage and pronunciation — perhaps out of commendable delicacy, in the interest of the avoidance of offense and the leers of pundits — have embraced phony phonetics, unanimously choosing to mispronounce the name of the president of Russia.”

* I decided not to dignify his title with a capital P

They’re hell to spell

I don’t know about you, but there are a few words that I can never spell right – especially when it comes to a handful of homophone pairs with different spellings (I always seem to choose the wrong one). Is the woman pictured above defending her right to bear arms or to bare arms? Apparently both, in her case, but it’s curious to see how often the implication of nudity tends to trump that of grizzly critters when referring to America’s dangerous second amendment. (It should, in fact, make you think of shooting furry animals rather than naked intruders.)

One pair that always gets me is past and passed, especially when you’ve just walked past someone but you’ve also passed them in the street. Right? And although I can tell the difference between a bear hug and a bare hug (yes, I’m one of the above), I’m verbally challenged in this department. Another one that crops up less frequently in everyday use but always has me reaching for the dictionary is horde and hoard. Compliment and complement can get tricky, especially when they’re complementary, and why doesn’t indiscretion mean you haven’t been discrete?

I have no problem with the most common and known offenders: their, there and they’re; your and you’re; its and it’s; weather and whether. Confusing peek and peak is a classic clanger; there’s even a tweeter called Stealth Mountain who warns of his or her mission: “I alert twitter users that they typed sneak peak when they meant sneak peek. I live a sad life.” Fortunately I don’t think I’ll ever become a Stealth Mountain victim — and that’s not just because I hardly ever tweet.

But it’s not just homophones that stop us in our spelling tracks with annoying and debilitating frequency. The exceptions to spelling rules that make the English language so impossible affect most of us, however fluently we might think we’ve mastered our native tongue. I trip up in all the following categories, and I’m the first to admit it. Here are some of the many reasons God sent us Microsoft Word’s red squiggly lines (although watch out for homophones: they’re good linguistic escape artists when it comes to spellcheckers):

Double trouble: Is spelling Caribbean a form of harassment that causes embarrassment? We might find it easy to accommodate, assimilate, or even to assassinate, but how hard is each word to spell, especially if the occurrence is millennial?

The -ents and -ants are apparently incessant problems, no matter how independent, non-existent, reluctant, intolerant or persistent your thinking might be.

The -ibles and -ables can be improbable too: who spells susceptible or irresistible without pause …?

“I before e except after c“, our teachers always told us. But what about weird? Is that weird?

It’s practically impossible to spell publicly logically. And a good politician will politicly be politically correct.

And what’s with supersede? I don’t think it’s what polygamists’ wives are doing to each other, although their husbands might well be doing it to them collectively — albeit with a different spelling …

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An earlier Glossophilia post looked at the world of homophones and homonyms (know the difference?), and here’s more on my horde/hoard blind spot.

Oreo’s and spud’s at the fair

Some errant apostrophes at the Columbia County Fair …