Say what?

I think I've mentioned the subject before, but it bears repeating: People who want to communicate something to others should do it in a way that doesn't make understanding the message a challenge or even impossible. Every time I become complacent enough to think that the average adult can do this, I find someone who should know better breaking some simple rule of writing and obscuring their message. Misspelling is one of the most frequent errors.

Today the reminder came in the form of a joke that was offered in an online space. It went something like this: "What did the green grape say to the purple grape? BREATH! BREATH!"

Breath?

After a moment I realized that the typist had meant "BREATHE! BREATHE!" because the purple color supposedly indicated asphyxiation. Cute joke, once I understood it, but there's the rub. The extra effort it took to decipher what was really intended knocked the legs out from under the humor. Too bad the typist hadn't chosen an oral delivery in which the spelling error never would have been detected.

Yes, call me a snob because I am one. Fundamentals of our own language -- or any language, for that matter -- matter. When I was a kid learning the basics of written and spoken English, I thought Spelling was just a memorization game for school rather than a necessary part of communicating accurately. Not until years later when a bunch of us were making posters to put on a homecoming float, and some of the posters had to be redone because they were misspelled did I make the connection. I don't remember the exact words now, but our class would have looked pretty foolish if the errors hadn't been corrected before the float traveled down the parade route for most of the town to see. Then I started to notice the kids who didn't spell well. I assumed that they weren't trying hard enough, and they'd improve in adulthood. Silly me.

At first, as a teacher of junior high English, I saw the matter in the same way: the kids who worked hard to memorize correct spelling succeeded in doing so, and somehow they were smarter than the kids who always did poorly on spelling tests. One day two of my students found me after school and asked me to help them translate a note that a boy had written to them because they didn't know from what he scribbled there if he liked one of them or not. Imagine that! Spelling mattered in a very practical way. We figured out together that apparently he did indeed like one of them, and they went on their way happily as I went on my way more sure of the need for correct spelling in communications. The intelligence half of my belief was shattered by an extremely smart and articulate boy who devoured thick paperback books in days, but who couldn't spell more than three words in a row correctly. Try as he might, he just couldn't manage to spell many words correctly. I don't know if there's a formal name for this kind of situation, but it must be something to do with the hard wiring in the brain. Clearly, he was a bright boy, but just as clearly, he couldn't spell worth a tinker's dam. I had to read his papers aloud phonetically to try to understand what he was attempting to say, and usually his insights were right on the money, but a lot of energy was involved in the discovery.

As a fairly new teacher whose classroom was on the top floor, I shared a classroom on the ground floor for one period a day with a math teacher to accommodate a student in a wheelchair. I was still naive enough to be shocked when I saw, written on the chalkboard by the math teacher, several misspelled words. Yikes! "Isn't that word wrong, Mrs. M? Isn't it supposed to be ______?" I heard from one of my students.

Before I could open my mouth, the voice of another student chimed in, "Oh, that's just Mr. K. He knows his math but he doesn't know how to spell anything right." I don't remember my exact response, but it was probably to refocus to our lesson while I erased the board and a reminder to myself to erase the board as soon as I arrived in the room on a daily basis. Later, when a bunch of us teachers were in conversation, Mr. K freely admitted that he had trouble spelling, that it wasn't his forte, and he didn't know why people made such a big deal out of it because it didn't have anything to do with how smart a person was or if they knew their material. I kept my newbie teacher mouth shut, as did at least one other math teacher, but a couple of his buddies ribbed him about it until he left the group, unhappy at being picked on. If I thought the episode would change his ways, I was being foolish because misspelled words continued to appear on the blackboard until the end of the year.

Did Mr. K's shortcoming in the area of spelling matter? Probably not as much to his students as it did to me. He taught the principles of mathematics -- proving congruence of triangles, charting correct slopes, determining the square root of a number -- and that, after all, was the purpose of his classes. Did his misspellings affect people's impression of him intellectually? Probably.

Fifteen years later I discovered another colleague spelling them "quizzs" instead of "quizzes" in a display on his bulletin board. When he asked me how I thought the display looked, I told him I thought it was very attractive....and I thought there was an E before the S in "quizzes." He didn't think so. A dictionary was found, and the truth of the matter was located within. He was dumbfounded that he'd been spelling the word incorrectly on the board, on handouts, in displays, and on folders for more than a dozen years and no one had called him on it. It mattered to him, and to this day he still mentions the issue on occasion when some communication error arises. Different folks, different styles, I guess.

Does correct spelling matter, especially in this age of texting when length of message seems to matter? Yes, it still does. I've been picked on for typing "you" rather than "u" in online text chat, and I had to work at teaching myself to ignore the need for capital letters in those chats, too, but I maintain that the style and purpose of the communication dictates the degree to which standard language format should be used. This discussion seems to replace the one about appropriate spoken language ("Would you say that to your grandmother?" "What if your mother heard you say that?") and yet it requires as much if not more consideration. If your application essay states,"I think this collage will be perfect for me," the director of admissions may think you're discussing a piece of artwork and toss your submission in the "I don't think so" pile. Colleges have their standards, after all. "U no what 2 do 4 now," seems an unlikely message to be left by a boss to her employees, but it might be fine in text messages on a cellphone between friends. Is your writing going to be seen by hundreds or thousands of people? Then be careful that your message is accurate, either in its pronunciation or in its spelling. That's all I'm trying to say.

(Now I'll go back to the top to see if Spell Check or my eyes can catch any errors before I publish this post!)