Sunday, 12 December 2004

Spelling follies

Will Baude and Heidi Bond are considering the difficulty of spelling various words correctly. Baude and Bond suggest “necessary, privilege and judgment” are difficult, as is “license.”

The latter two are perhaps difficult because the Commonwealth spellings “judgement” and “licence” are similar (but invalid in Standard American Written English).

Personally, I only seem to have trouble with “tendency”... which I managed to misspell on the American government exam I gave today, and is confusingly different from words like “attendance” that are pronounced the same. The moral of this story: flyspell-mode is your friend.

# By Chris Lawrence @ 12:42 am CST [Permalink] « (0)
Manual TrackBack URL for this entry: https://blog.lordsutch.com/tb.cgi/2239
Tags: Grammar, Trivia
 

2 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.
[Permalink] 1. Steven Jens wrote @ Sun, 12 Dec 2004, 11:39 pm CST:

Don’t suppose you know whether I can get ispell for Windows?

I think my ability to spell “necessary” is one of the few concrete advantages I obtained from having taken a Latin class. “Necesse” derives from “esse”, so I always remember which letter is doubled. In fact, all you need to do is add an “ry” to the Latin root: “necessery”. Piece of cake.

 
[Permalink] 2. Chris Lawrence wrote @ Sun, 12 Dec 2004, 11:49 pm CST:

Ah, yes, that’s one I sometimes have trouble with too.

 
Comments are now closed on this post.

Like what you’re reading?

To view other posts at Signifying Nothing, please visit the BlogFront.

Random Thoughts…

Signifying Nothing formerly featured the stylings of Brock Sides, a left-leaning philosopher turned network administrator currently residing in Memphis, Tennessee who now blogs at Battlepanda, and Robert Prather, a libertarian-leaning conservative economist and occasional contributor at OTB.

Syndication Feeds

Recently… ↓