In the 6th grade I won a spelling bee at my junior high school. I should have known it was all downhill from there.
Spell checkers have really done me in. It was once enough that Microsoft Word went around criticizing my every spelling mistake with red underline dashes but now Firefox is doing the same. The worst part is that I learn absolutely nothing from my mistakes since I misspell the same words all the time. I’ve been paying more and more attention to it this past year or so and I’ve discovered that a lot of the time I’m misspelling simply because my fingers are programmed to spell a word a certain way. For every word that I’ve ever used in the English language, my fingers will type it automatically like a dance routine they’ve memorized and if one of the movements is wrong it’s difficult to relearn the routine and reprogram my fingers to type it correctly. This theory becomes more apparent whenever I realize, often in the middle of a sentence, that this feels like the first time I’m ever typing a specific word. My fingers suddenly slow down and I have to look at the keyboard for once and of course both those acts is like a trapeze artist looking down at his feet during a performance.
Years from now all the tech junkies will be forced to attend grammatical rehab to undo years of damage. Writing a test with a pen is an act almost alien to me. I see the spelling mistake as I’m writing it but I continue writing anyways, glancing back briefly, half-expecting to see a red line suddenly appear beneath it, waiting for me to come back after I’ve finished it all.
All in all, technology is just making things too easy. The internal struggle that ensues is usually a part of me wanting to leave every spelling mistake as is so I’ll be forced to learn, while the other part finds that right clicking on those stupid red lines to be irresistible.
Oh and by the way, it’s not just as simple as misspelling a word, but spell checkers have actually caused some sort of erosion in my brain’s dictionary. Case in point, in that last paragraph I typed “unresistible” instead of “irresistible” and I actually put up a fight after my spell checker assured me that no such word exists. I became briefly frustrated enough to take it to court: aka Google. Suffice to say this resulted in me slapping my forehead. And I’ve just discovered that the brain erosion has resulted in major memory loss.
Dear technology…
I want the last 12 years of my life back.
*LOL* … you are fighting with your spell checker and the judge is google?? what does that say about you?
I think we are beyond brain erosion here.
I have a slightly different challenge. I actually CAN spell the word properly, but I still type it wrong. Every time. Predictably. For me, my fingers are programmed to type the letters in the wrong order even though I can see it’s wrong immediately. Spell check often ruins my words by correcting an incorrectly spelled word with the wrong word. Ahh the joys of technology.
what i hate about the grammar chech is that it wont let me use the passive form of a sentence…and all my work stuff is in the passive.
loool I always use Google to check my spelling and the structure of my sentences too, but I believe I’m a special hopeless case due to my very very bad memory and so I should send a thank-you letter to Google and Firefox for making my life easier.
lol.
(Firefox just underlined the above for me)
my pet peeve is that it uses the American dictionary as reference, so every time i type in ‘organised’, this angry red line appears as if screaming, “You will be culturally imperialised” (hmmm… there it is again, in Imperialised) ah, just can’t win.
How do i change the settings on this browser?
sari: perhaps!
MommaBean: You have a special situation going on there 😀
Fad: “the grammar chech”…maybe it’s not so bad! 😀
Shaden “I should send a thank-you letter” ah, but only if you remember to do that! 🙂
saaleha: “â??You will be culturally imperialisedâ?” lool this is the sentence I’ve been looking for to explain the same phenomenon.
“How do i change the settings on this browser?” You can’t. It cant only be destroyed (preferably with a silver bullet) 😀