And this blogger needs a “there, there” dear. I just misspelled something on Insty. Okay, so it’s the President’s name. This is why my characters are named things like Mary and Bob and Candyce and… Seraphim.
SOBS.
STOOOOOOOOOPID fingers.
Sulks. It’s not my fault. The sun was in my eyes. And I LIVE at high altitude. And I never have enough caffeine.
Eh. At least I’m not running for anything.
Dyslexics of the world untie! You have nothing to loose but you cairns cans chaims aims? commas!
Seriously, for the love of Bob, those of you who are following it? Ping me when I mess up, okay? You HAVE my email sahoyt – at- hotmail – dot- com. It’s not like I’m only doing one thing at a time.
According To Hoyt 
I learned early in my writing career — spelling is your editor’s job. And I flunked “Using Commas 101” and had to take it twice.
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I missed ALL my punctuation classes. In SEVEN languages, would you believe it?
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By bouncing back and forth from standard english, to ‘honors english’ a few times over the years through school I managed to miss all teaching on punctuation. I have heard the term ‘diagram a sentence’ but have never seen it done, much less know how to do it.
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Seems like we spent most of 8th grade diagramming sentences. I’m still not sure how that helped.
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I have seen it used to ward off a reporter, though. During the first Gulf War, a reporter at a press conference asked a briefer one of those impossible questions of the “Do you still kick dogs, or just beat your wife?”to variety, full of qualified gotchas.
The briefer looked at her, paused, and replied, “Ma’am, I’d like to see you diagram that sentence. ” After she finished spluttering at the laughter, he moved on.
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Oh, I’d like to see that done more often!
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My mom — teaching at the private school I was at — made us diagram sentences in… Hm. The equivalent to fifth grade, about?
I have mostly forgotten how to do it with all the fancy lines, but the idea that one breaks up sentences into certain chunks, which dangle off of other chunks, has actually been pretty good for me. It’s especially good when editing someone else’s quasi-technical-writing stuff — instinctively spotting the core of the sentence allows me to go, “How about [this much simpler construction] instead?”
Since he wants to learn how to do this stuff himself, I have also taken to singing “Comma Comma Comma Comma Comma Splicemeleon! Red, gold, and greee~~eeen!” when I find a comma splice. (Because earworms are the nerfbat of text, right?) And I dug up some “How to diagram sentences” pages on the web.
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It’s gone now, so anyone who only reloads Instapundit 2-3x a day is likely to have missed it. (I wouldn’t have known about it except for this post, for instance.)
And by the way, while I was searching for “Sarah Hoyt” on Instapundit to see if the typo was still there or not, I did notice a very clever title that I want to congratulate you for. “Bye bye to redistributed pie” was brilliant!
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Oh. Thank you. (Blushes.) I aim to please.
But really, I know you guys forgive me much spelling nonsense, but I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble with a bigger audience.
I’m the writer who can’t spell… Sigh.
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I somehow doubt you’re the only one.
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I spell phonetically. Which works well in Latin, German, and Spanish, but not so well in modern English. Curse you, grade-school “new mode” spelling classes!
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TXRed we might have been in the same school. I’m so bad at spelling that sometimes I have multiple tries until spellcheck recognizes the word for possible suggestions. And Sarah, I feel your pain. Self editing is hard enough. Doing it while multi tasking is a joke.
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I am caught between two song references. ‘built my Chevy on your taxes, but the vault tends to fry.’? No doesn’t really work. ‘I’m just a writer who can not spell, I’m in a terrible fix.’ No, not much better.
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I took a lot of math in college. Not once did I have a math prof. (all PhD’s) who could add or subtract. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.
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Silly you, Sarah Hoyte! Drink more coffee! Who cares about dyslexia when you write sci-fi? Readers will just think you’re building up a new language for your alien hero.
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er… I never have alien heroes. Not sure why. This is something that worries me.
Though it’s possible the shifter series which is — forfend — turning into SF (sobs) can be considered that…
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Politics be contained, for some of us altitude refreshes. It is not like running for office is the same thing as running a race. As to problems with dyslexia? I’ll leave that to Dog. He is a good dog, loveing and faithful, just what dog should be. Woof!
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sigh. Actually I’d like to get a dog. It’s just pending the kids moving out and hopefully our downsizing house wise, to make expenses more manageable. Yes, I know that’s not what you meant, but we’d call this dog Lord. Why? Because my childhood dog (like most decent toddlers, I was brought up by a dog and a cat) was named Lord — in English — not an unusual name for dogs in Portugal (something to do with the Napoleonic campaign, maybe?) He was an English Cocker Spaniel, white with brown spots and I only realized how much I missed him when I saw a look alike the other day.
So, eventually there will be a Lord II and our neighbors will think we’re insane when we whistle out, “Lord, come here Lord.” And “Lord, time for dinner.”
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Our cats have put up with ‘Clytemnestra’, ‘Imperious Primo’, ‘Puddleglum’, and finally Mittens The Gray Cat,Overhead and Underfoot Purr-bucket Lead-botton, formerly called Jake.
Luckily that last was a purely indoor animal by his own choice. He had slipped out one balmy day into bright sunshine. As can happen around here, the winds kicked up, the temperatures dropped and freezing rain started falling as a front moved in. Once he got back in he never willing left the house unless he was in the arms of myself or The Spouse. This cat did not believe in a door into summer, no quite the opposite.
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Half of my cats have ended up being called ‘Katti!’ or ‘Kissa!’ which both just mean ‘cat’. I have had several at the same time called mostly by that. I usually do give them names, but have a tendency to go for long, hard to pronounce ones which can be hard to yell when the wretched animal goes and drops something from the table.
Right now I have one who had a name when she came to me, so she’s Pörri (if the second letter doesn’t show on your computer, it’s o with an umlaut over it, pronounced a bit like the u in ‘fur’). Means something like ‘fluffy’. She’s a short haired cat who looks like she may have more than a little of something like maybe Siamese in her. Well, presumably she was sort of fluffy when she was a kitten… Have to admit that’s a lot easier to say than something like Galadriel (which I considered for one cat once, she ended being called Harmaa Kissa – meaning ‘grey cat’ – and, predictably, that got shortened to ‘Kissa’ in no time).
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My dogs respond to “Come’r Stupid” quite as well as they do to their names:) (I think they believe it is an endearment, since if I’m really mad at them I always use their name)
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One of my Mom’s cats answered to “no Clyde” because he heard it so much as a kitten and young cat. Sweet cat, just not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.
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How in the world did your parents manage to get that cat to light up? I have tried, and failed miserably, for years to get that trick to work. How do you keep the fur from burning off?
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To properly light a cat, first insert the flare in the… er, nevermind.
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DO YOU WANT TO SAY THAT? AT THIS TIME? IN THIS PLACE?
…. think carefully.
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I’M not the one who has been trying to light up a cat for years.
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You have to find a cat with a cigar before you can “light him.” While smoking can entail health risks, most cats can handle an occasional cigar without harm.
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Pixie, whom we once found “reading” (book open, paw on each page, head moving) a mystery, would have smoked a pipe if ONLY he had thumbs.
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Havey lights up when he sees food. Or gets pets. But mostly when he sees food.
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What – putting a flare in the exhaust pipe of the scale model racing car the “asbestos” clad cat is driving?
Admittedly, few cats are natural race-car drivers, but for those few that are they love out-running dogs.
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Havelock answers to Havey (and Havelock, but that he knows he’s in trouble) D’Artagnan answers to ‘tagnan and SLinky (short for Slinky McEvil. He also answers to “evil” — you figure it.) Miranda answers to Mir, Randa, Murmur and girl. Euclid answers to everything including Peesgrass, teakpot, neurotalon, neurotalot Euclid, Eucls AND all the other cats names. He’s our all purpose, generic cat.
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she’s Pörri (if the second letter doesn’t show on your computer, it’s o with an umlaut over it, pronounced a bit like the u in ‘fur’).
Um? My mind goes to Purri, a somewhat flakey Indian flat bread that often comes stuffed with a filling. Because it is traditionally made with Atta flour, which resembles a mix of whole wheat and white, the color of the cooked product resembles a tan with brown brindle. I could see it as a name for the right cat. MTGCOUPBLB,etc. was gray. He had no mittens. So I can imagine a cat who has short hair named Fluffy. The Spouse had a black cat he named Koshka which he had adopted while taking Russian in collage.
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a tan with brown brindle
Heh, that fits. I think the official name for Pörri’s coloring would be brown mackerel tabby with white markings.
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“Purry” is a lovely name for a girl cat.
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My mother has a girl cat named Tommy. I have twin cousins that she used to babysit when they were little, and she got two kittens, an orange tomcat they named Peaches, and a black tabbycat they named Tommy. Because as Lindy explained to my mom (they were four or five years old) all orange cats are girls and all black cats are boys.
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My much-mourned Pixie would have been very upset at being called a girl. He beat all other boy cats in the neighborhood. (And then left the girls sad, because he was — for medical reasons — fixed very early and had NO idea what to do…)
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That is perfectly correct! We currently have five cats. Hazel (calico and grumpy), Jammer (grey striped tabby male), Peaches (female orange tabby), Maria P.I.T.A (PITA means pain in the ass. Tuxedo), and Velcro (solid black Manx male). Every last one of them is spoiled rotten and they spend a great deal of time terrorizing the three dogs. I love animals. Oh, and we have a horse too, but she lives at the training stables. Kunama is Crystal’s 16 hands plus hunter jumper.
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I had a prof at Flat State U who named his cat “Stella.” Yup, so he could come home, stand in the driveway and yell, “Stellllaaaaaa!”
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Ok, I’m missing that reference, but I do have a dog named Stella ;)
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Ok, I’m missing that reference, but I do have a dog named Stella ;)
Don’t make me beat you down by the waterfront.
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In a streetcar named something or other.
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Still lost :(
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Tennessee Williams, Streetcar Named Desire. Marlon Brando played the lead on stage and screen.
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I recognize the name Marlon Brando, never heard of the rest of it.
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The film was made in 1951, directed by Elia Kazan. Along with Brando, it stared Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter. Of the twelve nominations for Oscars: Leigh (best actress), Malden (best supporting actor), Hunter (best supporting actress) and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black and White won. Well worth seeing, but don’t watch it when you need cheering up.
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heh. We read A Streetcar Named Desire in high school. When we reached that part, the teacher let us have a contest to see who could yell ‘STELLLLAAAAA’ the loudest. Indoors, no less. :) Good times, good times.
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That was a teacher who understood a bit about kids.
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“My Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?”
When selecting a name for a free-roaming pet it is always wise to anticipate how you will sound walking the street calling said pet’s name. For this reason it is always wise to avoid naming your cat “Hey, Sailor!”
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Kate Paulk has named her cat Bugger. Yes, he has got out late at night. Yes, she’s roamed the neighborhood hitting a dish with a spoon and singing out “Bugger!”
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Clyde and her son trained us to beat the spoon against a tin of catfood when we were serious about them coming t the door. It always worked, one time per tin.
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I had a high-school teacher who told us about a friend of his who wanted to call his 30-sailboat the “Thilly Thavage” – just because he wanted to hear the Coast Guards shout “Ahoy, the Thilly Thavage!” I believe the friend was talked out of this notion with great difficulty.
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I have a dog named Chica also, that works almost as good as Sailor. Hmm, “Come’r Chica,” “Come’r Sailorboy.”
Nope your right, Sailor is better, although Babe is always a good name for a female ;)
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Oh, you almost got me that time, and it would have been bad. I had a sip of Scotch to my mouth when i read that one, and it nearly came out my nose.
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Heck, I can’t spell either – so I am eternally grateful to whoever invented Spell-check. (Thank you, G*d!) Now I don’t look nearly as much a fool as I would otherwise. But one day I wrote a blogpost about the middle east, and it was posted for hours, and no less than three commenters had pointed out that I meant Iraq, but had put in Iran…
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Spell-Czech is knot awl weighs ewer fiend.
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*giggle”
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Sew threw!
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Ah, so not only did you get there well, but you’re still silly. Good to know :) Wouldn’t have it any other way.
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When I was young my best friend was a 95 pound cinnamon beige standard poodle who I had named deGaulle. (What did I know, I was a kid.) Momma said I should trust his judgement, she was right.
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Which, on further thought, might be more than relevant to the post it was supposed to be connected to, for there are those who believe that Gen. Charles de Gaulle thought he was G-d
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Mom named her favorite cat (a rarity, she’s not an animal lover) Moshe Dayan. (He was born with a missing eye.) I think most of the village thought she was calling out nonsense syllables.
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At least you didn’t misspell somebody importants’ name.
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There there Sarah … in Australia we say ‘Have a nice cup of tea and a lie down …’
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Is that similar to taking two aspirin and a cup of tea?
Maybe I should try tea and a lie down, having just gotten off the road. First, I have to find a teapot, as I may have found the only motel in America that doesn’t have a coffee pot in each room. See, Sarah? It could be worse … there could be no caffeine at all nearby!
Still, no one is shooting at us, so it’s a good day.
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INDEED on the good day, but yeah, a lot of these places don’t have coffee pots. I swear next time I travel with one!
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The Daughter and I travel with a large rolling rubbermaid we call the portable kitchen. It includes a small coffee maker.
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“I just got a new keyboard and it isn’t properly broken in” excuses ALL spelli- … er, typing errors.
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And here we could be excused for thinking you did it deliberately, to see if anyone was paying attention ….
Bet there was someone out there trying to figure out if the spelling was some obscure joke or putdown, and 99.999% of readers, used to interpreting the internet, didn’t even notice.
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Before cataract surgery, I could not always see my spelling mistakes. Now that I need to stop and proofread. It is not as much fun to post. And still mistakes happen. You at least have enough languages that it is possible you learned to spell a particular in a different language. After living in 3 different English speaking countries I know that we share a common language but not the spelling or the idiom.
On the pet front, my mother’s collie was called “Honey”. Dad really hated to be the one who had to search for her.
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As Winston Churchill said, “One people, separated but by a common language.” He wasn’t kidding.
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In matters vaguely connected to that Churchill quote, my favorite airline ad ever is a British Airways ad that says: “Come home America. All is forgiven.”
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I dunno — I think America grew up and moved out. It’d get kinda crowded to go back to the family cottage.
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I heard there was quite a row, with some family members saying that America wasn’t ready yet and others saying the kid’s got a point, give ‘m a chance, and America finally claiming to be unappreciated and abused and leaving in spite of objections, threats and importuning.
And a few years later Britain was in tough straits and tried pushing America ’round and saying “you’re still part of our family, kid, you need to pitch in and give us some support.” IIRC, Britain even sent some thugs around to trash America’s capital and things got a little hazy.
And even when America had that nasty squabble and almost separated, didn’t the Brits do their best to exacerbate the split, providing support to the faction that didn’t like the new president so much they threatened to leave?
It seems to me that the “forgiving” thing should go the other way ’round. Fortunately for the Brits, America has long been of a forgiving nature, else we’d have left them to hang themselves out to dry a couple times last century.
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Nah, the Brits didn’t really do anything during during our little internal squabble. Many of them would not have supported the guys who tried to leave as those guys had some bad habits that many Brits disliked. Sure there was that mix-up about the Brit’s ship but cooler heads won among the Brits.
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I was originally taught British English, but what I have been mostly reading during the last 30 years or so, and heard in movies (on TV, about half and half, British series are popular here), is American English. I worked one summer in Canada, and two summers with an American woman, and I have one friend with whom I mostly speak English who is from New Zealand (although, after living here nearly a couple of decades, he is finally starting to speak understandable Finnish. Complains that everybody speaks just English with him, but his daughter is old enough now to speak so maybe she has been tutoring him:)).
Well, I suppose I mostly use American English.
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I hvate it whern I forget to chekc my spelling. Dumbf at fingers get me ewvry time. :-D
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I am actually dyslexic, I just have a series of workarounds so most of the time I type things right. The problem is when I don’t, I don’t see it.
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Exactly. Had a college teacher who suggested I look up each and every word of which I was not sure, I told her that would have to be just about every one of ’em.
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YES. I’d never write anything.
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Oh heck – anything is one of the easiest words to remember. No tricksy “i before e except on days beginning with s” rules or nething.
I have observed that one problem afflicting dyslexics is that, hyper-aware of their affliction, they become incredibly self-conscious and prone to doubt EVERY word they spell, including I, you and me.
I, on the other hand, supremely confident in my spelling blame the words and the dictionary for the errors. I am right, it is the word that is wrong. I am quite liberal in that view.
As Andrew Jackson reportedly sed, it is a d-mn poor fool who can think of but one way to spell a word.
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N.B., this is why people should always be wary about asking me “How do you spell ———-“, as I will provide my preferred spelling, not the officially designated spelling. Sometimes the “proper” spelling isn’t.
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Particular word. See I checked the spelling not the sense of the sentences!
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Sigh. I’ll usually be stealing glances at your blog and other essential online stuff at work, and won’t be able to look closely at it till I get home in the evening. I never saw the misspelling. I assume someone fixed it before I got home.
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Does it make you feel any better that I’ve seen several different spellings of his first name… sometimes in the same news report?
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Either way, there’s a reason I use Google Chrome. I can usually catch their/there/they’re issues, but spelling? Um….
(If you worry about privacy, make multiple email addresses. Use one for banking log-in account only, use another for normal stuff, and use the third for an actual email. Add layers as needed.)
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Ah, you saw it. Also he spelled it differently at different times in his life. (Bites tongue to suppress remark about Chinese restaurants. Can’t cast stones, having changed what she went by several times growing up AND her name once BUT I’m convinced he did it to mess with me, personally, because the world revolves around my belly button.)
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I do not see how anyone could get confused by or misspell the name of the current President of the United States.
Jefferson Finis Davis, Junior
Practically nothing at all to remember, see?
I’m not sure if I can cast stones, never having used anything other than my legal name IRL, or can’t, because of all the different handles and accounts on the internet.
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Funny, I have only seen Chinese fire drills done in vehicles.
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Oh jeez. You’re worried about misspellings and commas?
…it could be worse. Trust me.
My dyslexia is typing entire sentences …and only noticing hours later that I’d left out the words (or, sob, phrase), that actually made the sentence make sense.
And the affliction seems to strike hardest when I’ve written something profoundly brilliant.
…rendering it barely odd, at best.
I mean, after all: it’s not like I wasn’t *thinking* the damn words while I was furiously typing away.
*IT’S NOT MY FAULT*.
At least I can spel thoguh.
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I mean, after all: it’s not like I wasn’t *thinking* the damn words while I was furiously typing away.
Oh my yes.
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Having read and marked more first year English 101 papers than I want to count, I no longer expect anyone to use proper spelling or punctuation. It is always a pleasant surprise to see an assignment that has actually had a spell check program run against the text. Amazing things, computers, too bad so many people only use them to become worse at writing rather than better.
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Karron! You’re back. (Was mildly worried.)
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Sorry to go AWOL, but my system had a catastrophic and ugly demise over a week ago. I also had to move my office from the back of the house to our former dining room, resulting in chaos. And, of course, I came down with a rotten cold and strep . . . lovely. And when I got everything repared, preplaced (a whole new box as the motherboard fried along with everything else from a huge lightening strike mucking things up), only to end up with Hal having to go out and buy a new router this morning too. ARRRGHHHH!!! I felt like I was in limbo. SO much to do, and no way to get it done. Anyway, back again to make innane and useless comments.
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My major problem is typing common words backwards — dna for and, eht for the, mih for him, and a few others. Luckily spell-check catches MOST of them, but a few still get through. They’re also bugaboos to catch on a normal edit.
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I only do that when EXTREMELY tired. For some reason I can type entire sentences flawlessly back-to-front
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I don’t type things backwards, but for several months after my stroke, I typed things out of time. The stroke threw off my right-hand reflexes, so that hand typed slower than the left, and letters could be, let us say, delayed till later in the word.
So I might set out to type ‘typewriter’ and come out with ‘tyepwrtier’. ‘Error’ might come out ‘errro’.
It took quite a while to adjust. I’m still not sure my typing speed has fully recovered.
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