Speeling spelling appalling

I joke that I almost failed 4th grade because I can’t spell. Only half of that sentence is true however, and it isn’t the failing 4th grade part.

I have a fairly decent vocabulary due likely to my voracious reading habits as a teenager. My spelling abilities never kept up however and over the past 10 years I’ve become totally reliant on spell check. This isn’t a problem in most all of my written communication as most everything I do these days is on the computer. Worst-case I have a word that even spell check won’t recognize, Google comes to the rescue and figures out which word I’m aiming for with the jumble of characters I’ve thrown together.

Recently, however, I’ve started texting more and there are times that the iPhone isn’t able to figure out what I meant. (And I’m a full-sentence texter, including capitalization and punctuation – no ‘how r u’. Ever.) Sometimes I think I’ve even unintentionally trained it with my misspelled words which pisses me off to no end. I find it sad and frustrating that I’ve become so dependent upon electronic tools to be able to effectively communicate in the manner I wish.

So with that, it appears that roughly 24 years after the 4th grade I may really have to learn how to spell words like the following without the help of spellcheck:

• fiery (not firey!?)
• serendipitous (not serindipitous)
• definitely (not definately and certainly not defiantly)
• fortuitous (not fortuitious)
• nonexistent  (not nonexistant)
• witty (not whitty, this one was perhaps the saddest of all)

And those are just the ones I’ve encountered in the past 48 hours.