Visit An Old Friend!

I did something new and exciting the other day. Well, maybe not so new, but certainly exciting. It involved a book. Remember those things? I love books. I always get my conference syllabus in book form. I just like the way they look on the shelf. To me it is so much easier to flip through the pages of a book in my hands than it is to click through a bunch of pages on a computer screen. Books will always deserve a place in my house

What led to this? Well, I couldn't spell a word and no matter how much I teased automatic spell check, it would not cooperate. So I turned to this other word source. It came up with words I didn't even know existed. Of course, that is not a bad thing. I hesitated for a minute and skimmed the words on the page.  Automatic spell check does not afford you that courtesy. It gives you the word you are looking for and then moves on to someone who has forgotten how to spell to, two, and too and really screws up the meaning of yet another sentence.

I would "put money on it" that automatic spell correction on cell phones and computers has started a lot of fights just by inserting the wrong word in a text message. And then I remembered my husband and my cousin, Jerry, who both had hearing problems. Too much loud music in their early years maybe? They had their own form of automatic spell check. It was what they thought they had heard. Their conversations were classics. They could talk about two completely different subjects at the same time. Ok, you baby boomers out there know what I am talking about. At our age we tend to hear things wrong. Sort of like senior automatic spell check. We hear the wrong word and the conversation takes a wrong turn. 

So maybe instead of relying on automatic spell check on the phone or computer, you should pull that book off of the shelf in your office. You know the one that is all dusty and lonely. The one that never gets any attention any more, but still sits there waiting patiently for you to come back and enjoy its pages. 

Visit your local dictionary and thesaurus. They miss you!!