Still Learning
I'll admit it. I sometimes over use the spell check. I type mindlessly, hoping that whatever bedraggled semblance of a word I put together will be picked up by the computer's outrageous brain, thereby moving my work along a bit more quickly and keeping me from the real hassle of learning to properly spell. It's not all lazy, though, that keeps me in this habit. This morning, I typed an email and needed to include a word that meant very bad. I went through this thought process "I know there is a word that looks like this, I have seen this word before and since I can't think of what the word is, I will just type the letters that I think the word looks like." Sure enough, spell check caught it.
The option it gave me, though, was a bit mystifying: "Egg-greg-ee-ous." No, that can't possibly be right. I've never heard that word in my life. So I consulted my second best tool, which, despite the stack of reference books on the shelf, is of course a Google search. And sure enough, spell check doesn't lie. Egg-greg-ee-ous. And suddenly, a revelation! Egregious! I-gree-jus! A word that I have heard countless times, but never recognized as the word I was reading as egg-greg-ee-ous.
("Are you kidding me?" thinks everyone - especially the high schools students who I am supposed to interview for Harvard admission.)
When I was a child I had a very good vocabulary. Maybe not a 1600 SAT vocabulary (I know, they've since changed the system), but for a second grader at Manchester Elementary it was a very good vocabulary. The problem with it, though, was that it was a visual vocabulary, filled with words that I had only ever read and never heard.
Lie-ver-ee, for example, was never heard aloud until driving the vans for the Charles River Rowing Camps. "We've got liver-ee plates," Cory says, "so you can stay right outside the airport terminal." Livery? Like liver inside your body? Are you sure? Because livery, like live animals in a lie-ver-ee makes a lot more sense and I'm pretty sure that is what Laura Ingalls Wilder was talking about.
Even as a very little girl, I used to love the Reader's Dig-gest. (I was constantly considering sending in my own jokes to "Laughter, the Best Medicine.") In fact, I can recall telling a friend's mom a joke that I had read in the dig-gest; she missed the punchline though, in favor of correcting my pronunciation with "die-jest." "No," I thought, "she must be wrong. There's no way the word is die-jest. Die-jest is like digestion, which is a lot like talking about poop and that makes me uncomfortable."
Though the funnier story is probably the second grade girl trying to quote from a magazine for retired optimists to the parents of her classmates, it cracks me up to think of the way in which my little child brain was working (also amusing to rediscover the indignation that I exhibited for those who tried to correct me; and that spell check still insists that "indignance" is not a word). And so, despite eye rolls from those who can read and speak, I find it refreshing to know that after all these years the language still holds these little surprises for me! And now that we talk about poop all the time, it's exciting to learn about these proper pronunciations without embarrassment of such toilet talk.
As an addendum:
It went both ways-visual to acoustic and acoustic to visual, with matched attitude on my part. My third grade teacher used to have stacks of comic strips with the words cut out of the word bubbles. After you were finished with your work, you could glue the comic strip to a piece of construction paper and fill in the bubbles with your own jokes. I remember a Calvin & Hobbes strip, in which the duo went sledding down a hill, only to end up in a puddle. My comment had Calvin telling Hobbes "instead of sledding, it looks like we went wetting!" My teacher corrected me "the word you're looking for is wading." I doubt that was the word I was looking for, because wetting, as in getting wet, makes more sense and it loosely rhymes with sledding.
The option it gave me, though, was a bit mystifying: "Egg-greg-ee-ous." No, that can't possibly be right. I've never heard that word in my life. So I consulted my second best tool, which, despite the stack of reference books on the shelf, is of course a Google search. And sure enough, spell check doesn't lie. Egg-greg-ee-ous. And suddenly, a revelation! Egregious! I-gree-jus! A word that I have heard countless times, but never recognized as the word I was reading as egg-greg-ee-ous.
("Are you kidding me?" thinks everyone - especially the high schools students who I am supposed to interview for Harvard admission.)
When I was a child I had a very good vocabulary. Maybe not a 1600 SAT vocabulary (I know, they've since changed the system), but for a second grader at Manchester Elementary it was a very good vocabulary. The problem with it, though, was that it was a visual vocabulary, filled with words that I had only ever read and never heard.
Lie-ver-ee, for example, was never heard aloud until driving the vans for the Charles River Rowing Camps. "We've got liver-ee plates," Cory says, "so you can stay right outside the airport terminal." Livery? Like liver inside your body? Are you sure? Because livery, like live animals in a lie-ver-ee makes a lot more sense and I'm pretty sure that is what Laura Ingalls Wilder was talking about.
Even as a very little girl, I used to love the Reader's Dig-gest. (I was constantly considering sending in my own jokes to "Laughter, the Best Medicine.") In fact, I can recall telling a friend's mom a joke that I had read in the dig-gest; she missed the punchline though, in favor of correcting my pronunciation with "die-jest." "No," I thought, "she must be wrong. There's no way the word is die-jest. Die-jest is like digestion, which is a lot like talking about poop and that makes me uncomfortable."
Though the funnier story is probably the second grade girl trying to quote from a magazine for retired optimists to the parents of her classmates, it cracks me up to think of the way in which my little child brain was working (also amusing to rediscover the indignation that I exhibited for those who tried to correct me; and that spell check still insists that "indignance" is not a word). And so, despite eye rolls from those who can read and speak, I find it refreshing to know that after all these years the language still holds these little surprises for me! And now that we talk about poop all the time, it's exciting to learn about these proper pronunciations without embarrassment of such toilet talk.
As an addendum:
It went both ways-visual to acoustic and acoustic to visual, with matched attitude on my part. My third grade teacher used to have stacks of comic strips with the words cut out of the word bubbles. After you were finished with your work, you could glue the comic strip to a piece of construction paper and fill in the bubbles with your own jokes. I remember a Calvin & Hobbes strip, in which the duo went sledding down a hill, only to end up in a puddle. My comment had Calvin telling Hobbes "instead of sledding, it looks like we went wetting!" My teacher corrected me "the word you're looking for is wading." I doubt that was the word I was looking for, because wetting, as in getting wet, makes more sense and it loosely rhymes with sledding.
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