Mispelling

Over UEA weekend (you can tell I'm desperate for a topic because of how long ago this happened), I drove by Lakeridge Junior High. What I saw on their announcement board shocked me. It boldly stated that there was, "No Skool." Quite frankly, I thought that that word was one that we learned in first grade, under that category of words that we would all learn to hate. And yet, at this institution of education, the school misspelled itself. Within the analytical part of my mind, which had by then experienced an "awakening" in the form of metaphorical caffeine (analytical paragraphs I did and then forgot about) prescibed by Dr. Rich, I pondered, "how is this type of misspelling possible?" And then I realized that I was supposed to be watching the road, the caffeine wore off, and I forgot about the experience until my mind was "awakened" by another metaphorical drug I call "last minute blog panic."

One thing that has led to the culture of misspelling that we live in is instant and text messaging. Wait... that was two things... but this is about spelling, not math! The degree of misspelling in an instant message or text message is often referred to as the "text"-ure. Seriously, though, spelling is thrown out the window, quite possibly literally, in these forms of communication. They rely heavily on spelling things "phonetically," which is just another way of saying, "in as few letters as possible". A couple of examples of this are substituting "u" for "you" and "r" for "are." Another aspect of this form of communication is the use of acronyms that no one but the person who uses them understands, with examples like "btw" for "by the way," "brb" for "be right back," and "ATP" for "adenosine triphosphate." And my personal favorite, "DNA", "Dynamic Nuclear Accelerators." Needless to say, these incomprehensible forms of communication not only make no sense, but are also really fun to mock. No, I meant to say, have a large impact on the ability of people to spell correctly.

Another problem with misspelling is those darn Brits. I mean, another problem that creates spelling errors stems from the beliefs of our British brethren. These people are whack jobs. I mean, these, our brethren, and sistern, are misguided individuals who love to misspell things. The first example of this is the "'re' not 'er'" rule. This results in words, or misspellings, like "centre," metre", and "Petre." Another example is the "unnecessary 'e' rule." This rule involves putting 'e's in random places where they don't belong, like "towne." Combinations of these rules could create rather unfortunate misspellings of mass proportions, such as, "towne centre." I can only imagine what a terrorist could do with one of those rules. "Everybody freeze, or I'll add an unnecessary 'e' to your mom!" Actually, I believe that these rules of misspelling actually came from the American Revolution. In an attempt to render their communications incomprehensible to the traitors, who we fondly refer to as "patriots", the British soldiers, who we fondly refer to as "lobsterbacks," devised a new form of code, not unlike modern Pig Latin, which involved rearranging words ending in "re" and adding "e"'s to everything they could think of. This new system was highly effective, and still confuses people to this day.

As we can see from this highly informative essay (that's a joke!), this is a very real problem which must be solved if we don't wish to go back to the Dark Ages, where NO ONE knew how to spell. This might have been because the Dark Ages were too dark to see, and they just randomly scribbled, but I think that the main reason was that people made up the stuff. This resulted in strange spellings of things like, "Todaye Brothre Josef fel intu the toylet. I rekwestd that he tayke a bathe." Imagine the mass turmoil and pandemonium that would ensue from such a situation! Wouldn't that be great?! I mean, this is a very real problem that we must solve. And what is the solution to this problem? How should I know? I'm just the guy who points out the problems of society, and irresponsibly does nothing with the knowledge of these problems, who is also exempt from all these problems, because he is perfecte. I g2g.