Top 5: Words I Usually Misspell

As a former English major, I really should know better than to have bad grammar. The other day I used the wrong "to" in a text message and twice this afternoon I've typed "no" instead of "know." I don't know what's happening to me, maybe I need to take some remedial spelling tests or something? Despite my recent failure to communicate, there have always been some words that I consistently spell incorrectly (I'm sure everyone has a similar list, even if they don't like to admit it). These are the five words that I have to look up in the dictionary the most.


5. Misspell 
Seriously, I had to look it up before I titled this post because I can never remember how many S's are in it. The worst part is that the reason I always misspell it is that I once read that it is a commonly confused word, and they explained that rather than compounding miss + spell into "missspell" or "miss-spell" it has one less S, as in "misunderstand." Therefore I always try to give it less S's and end up with "mispell," which means nothing.

4. Receipt
Who decided it was a good idea to put silent letters in words? Words like "aisle," "knife," "gnarl" and "chord" have too many consonants, to the bane of schoolchildren taking spelling tests worldwide. What good does putting that "g" on the front of "gnarl" do besides make it look cooler? It has absolutely no effect on the sound. And the word "receipt" is extra tricky, with a silent letter AND and "E" before an "I." That's just uncalled for.

3. Ridiculous
Sometimes I wish that English had a different letter for every single sound in our language. I know we would probably end up with 47 letters with weird accents and notations, but it sure would make pronunciation easier. I always try to spell this "rediculous" because I associate the "rid-" spelling with long i sounds like the word "ride." I propose we adopt the phonetic spellings that come after words in the dictionary and start using things like upside-down e's in everyday writing.

2. License 
I don't know who made up this stupid word. It's probably Latin, which would explain the awkward spelling. For some reason it uses an "s" and a "c" to represent the same sound in the same word, just to make things more confusing. It typically takes me a couple of tries (lisence, licensce, licence) before I land on the right one. Can't we just call it a permit?

1. Recieved Received
Never fail, every single time I type that word I do it wrong. I know that "I" goes before "E" except after "C" - the phrase was drilled into me during elementary spelling lessons - but for the life of me I cannot remember it when I'm trying to write the word. Who made up that rule, anyway? I think that since my name (Wesleigh) is one of the "... and on certain occasions" that "E" can come before "I" I subconsciously believe that it is the correct way to arrange the letters. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

Top 5: Weird Song Associations

Have you ever been listening to the radio when a certain song comes, bringing back random memories from your past? One minute you're in traffic on your way home from work, and the next you're reliving your senior prom, all because of a simple song change. I don't know if I just had a really odd childhood or what, but when it come to songs triggering memories, I sure come up with some weird combinations. Check out my list and see what you think:

5. Lean on Me by Bill Withers  = Church Camp

This one is probably not a far stretch.  The song is about being there for your friends, and was the theme song to a junior/senior high church camp one year. It was sentiment was cheesy, but as high schoolers so were we, so it worked. When I put together the photo montage of our experience we played it to this song. Now every time I hear it I think of kids covered in mud jumping in the lake. 

4. Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles  = Trigonometry

In high school, I took a lot of advanced math classes (I know, what was I thinking?). I was smart enough to take Algebra in 8th grade so by time I got to high school I was a year ahead of the majority of my classmates. I even took AP Calculus - clearly my school did not offer enough art classes to keep me entertained. Anyway, I had a certain teacher who tried to make math more fun - looking back she most have done a pretty good job, as don't even like math and took all of her classes - but was painfully behind on the times. Case in point: to help us memorize trig formulas, we played a tortuous version of musical chairs while she played a tape of The Bangles, which she called Walk Like a Radian - you walked around a circle on the floor marked with radians, and whatever one you stopped at you had to recite the formula.  I don't remember any of the formulas but now the Bangles remind of pi.

3. Fly by Sugar Ray = Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

What in the world does Judy Blume have to do with Sugar Ray? Short answer: 1997. That was the year my class went on a field trip to see the play based on Blume's book at the local theater. As with most field trips, we took a school bus, and piled in 80 or so kids plus teachers. Of course we begged the driver to turn the radio on, and this was one of the chart-toppers of the time. Somehow every single kid knew the words to this song and most of them sang along loudly, probably to the chagrin of all the adults within a mile radius. The lyric "all around the world statues crumble for me" will forever bring back memories of kids singing happily and a story about a little brother called Fudge.

2. I Saw the Sign by Ace of Base  = Annie Get Your Gun 

My high school, like most in the midwest, puts on a spring musical every year. They've put on all sorts of productions, from Footloose to Oklahoma!, and my senior year the play of choice was Annie Get Your Gun. I had a lot of study halls that year - I'd taken everything possible, went to a local college for post-secondary work, and still had at about two hours of it a day - so when asked if I wanted to get out of it to paint sets, I jumped at the chance. The teacher only excused seniors and then left us unattended in the auditorium (probably not the best idea), so we blared music and wasted the afternoon painting. Somehow I ended up being the only girl with a group of guys I otherwise never would have hung out with (if it had been The Breakfast Club, I was Allison and they were Bender). And for reasons I still don't understand they were obsessed with Ace of Base, which we listened to on repeat until someone got sick of it and put in Metallica instead. Since then the 90s girl band and the old west have always been connected in my mind.

1. Centerfold by J Geils Band = Saturday Mornings

This sounds like a really creepy memory, but it's not, honest. When I was a kid my Dad and I would get up about the same time on Saturday mornings, and whenever it was on we would watch Pop-Up Videos on VH1. The music videos were usually a combination of current 90s stuff and classic 80s pop. I learned all sorts of random trivia about Paula Abdul's Opposites Attract, Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, Men Without Hat's Safety Dance, and of course, J Geils Band's Centerfold. Obviously I didn't know what most of the songs were about, being about 10, but it was fun hanging out with Dad listening to music he liked. The only downside is that weird songs like Come On, Eileen remind me of my father.

Kill Your Darlings

I'm on the blogging rotation at work, so every other month or so I have the opportunity to write and share an article that gets published on the FrazierHeiby staff blog. My most recent one is about a professor's advice to "kill your darlings" - you can visit our blog here. You may have to scroll down to find my article. Feel free to read through some of the other blog posts, too!

Ugly fonts make learning easier?

According to Princeton researchers, reading documents in obnoxious typefaces makes our brains work harder to comprehend the information and therefore are more likely to remember it. Maybe our teachers were on to something when every handout was set in Comic Sans...