Thankful Sunday, October 27, 2019

I am thankful that my spell check is fixed.

The old-fashioned spell check my mother used.
I still like to look in it sometimes.

I used to be a good speller. I got 100% on all of my spelling tests in grade school. I was runner up to the school champion at the spelling bee in 8th grade. I really never gave spelling a second thought. It was easy. Just use the phonics spelling rules, learn a few exceptions and that was that.

I was enlightened, when I had kids, that spelling was not so automatic for everyone. When Wally was learning to write, we thought he was just writing gibberish. That was until we got a program that read what he had written. And by golly, it was full of words, sentences, and stories. However, my mind that spelled most things correctly couldn't comprehend Wally's way of spelling. He helped me understand that spelling was something that was easy for some and not for others. But it was easy for me.

Jump ahead a few years to when word processing, including spell check, was widely available. Then I no longer had to remember how to spell everything, but I was still pretty good at it. Spell check was mostly catching my typos.

Leap ahead more years and the "use it or lose it" principle was starting work. I got used to spell check spelling for me and I wasn't so good at spelling anymore. I knew that I just had to approximate the word and spell check would take care of the rest.

And now today, I don't know how to spell most complicated words and especially get mixed up with all of the short vowel sounds in words. Is it an e, i, or a that goes in that syllable? I don't always get it right. I have come to depend on spell check for that.

So when a couple of weeks ago, the spell checker on our email program stopped working, I was at a loss. The checker never found any problems, but I knew that wasn't right. I certainly hadn't sent out a weeks worth of emails without one spelling mistake. After some investigation, I figured out that the dictionary had been deleted. I fixed that and I'm back in business again.

So for the fact that the spell checker on my email program is fixed and I don't have to depend on my poor spelling skills, I am thankful.

Note: There is certainly a lot of discussion to be had about the pros and cons of how technology is changing our brains. Specifically in this case, whether or not it's good that spell check has taken away many of our spelling skills or that it has relieved us of spelling hassles so we can concentrate on other parts of communication. But I'll save that for another time.

(And we won't even go into auto correct, the old grammar rules we are losing with texting, etc.)