Thursday, September 13, 2012

just breath

a few years ago, i was invited into a new friend's house to see some decorating she had done. we had not spent much time together and i did not know her well but i went through her rooms willingly and complimented her on all she had done to make her home a more personal space for herself. in one of the rooms, she had attempted to create a "zen" atmosphere with calm colors and a soothing ambiance. on the wall in large, dark letters was the word, "breath." i stared at it for a while and then i couldn't help myself. "what does that spell?" i asked. she looked at me like i was the most stupid person on the planet and told me, "breathe." you could hear the "duh" in her exasperated response. knowing that my reply to her frustrated response would be less than polite, i smiled, bit my tongue, and just said, "oh, okay," and moved on. she rolled her eyes at my stupidity and we moved to another room.

as time has gone by, i've become more and more aware that we are a nation of some of the worst spellers on the planet. when i was in high school, our ongoing complaint in English class was that we would never need the vast majority of the vocabulary words we were learning to spell and define. back then, when the internet was just taking off and social media was not in existence, teachers had to scramble to come up with a worthwhile defense of the necessity of learning words like "cotillion." then, very few would see your written words. today, the exact opposite is the case. our collective poor spelling is on display for the world to see and, frankly, it's a little embarrassing.

there are websites dedicated to mocking poor spelling on public signs. there are really too many to count. take this example recently found in charlotte welcoming people to the "democatic" national convention.



i'm embarrassed for them. in new york, they painted the following on the street for school crossing. so, so sad. 


teachers of high school students today can defend the necessity of their work simply by saying, "you don't want to look like a moron on facebook; do you?"

add that with to the horrors of some of the "autocorrect" words punched in with our smart phones and we are in serious trouble. the sites dedicated to this are absolutely hilarious. check out www.autocorrectfail.org for a good laugh. i could sit on that site for hours...just for a little pick me up.



besides just poor spelling, we also seem to have forgotten how to punctuate. granted, i'm writing on a site that doesn't use capital letters. still, i can appreciate a correctly placed comma and period as much as the next gal. "let's eat grandma." "let's eat, grandma." punctuation saves lives, people!

i am just as culpable as others. somehow we've become too busy to proofread anymore. maybe we should all just slow down a little bit and read through what we are about to post...whether in sign form, post form or tweet. maybe we could stop hitting ourselves over the head once we go back and read what we have just sent out into the universe. let's all take a minute to slow down. just breath, people, just breath.

10 comments:

  1. Genelle, I will never forget when I saw her "breath" on the wall. We are still laughing about that! You're right we all need to proofread. Great post, you're hilarious!
    Anne =)

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    1. sadly, i think about it all the time too...and it makes me laugh. oh well...if i have something misspelled on my wall, please make sure you correct me!

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  2. Bwa ha ha... you are better than i, I would have said "Breathe has an E." Surely someone told her... And hopefully (sadly) she felt like a moron for rolling her eyes at you condescendingly in her ZEN room...

    I am so guilty of taking on too many things at once and not proof reading. :( This was a great post though because it is pretty bad, everywhere. This week I have noticed gross mis-spellings in news articles as well as a magazine story.

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    1. i see misspellings everywhere...books, newspapers, everywhere they seem to print things. we seriously need some new editors out there!

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  3. Yes, I would have corrected before I asked! I am a spelling bee champion and I get irritated when people misspell words. I especially hate it when people are chastising me for my politics but can't spell anything correctly or use proper grammar. I immediately discount what they are saying as dumb!

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    1. oh man, a spelling bee champion. you've got me beat ten times over. i'm only a competent speller thanks to a crazy thing called a dictionary.

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  4. As a newly hired teacher I felt the need to show our principal a few errors on the hallway bulletin board. Surely the teacher who did this must be embarrassed! I felt sure our principal would want to know so we could quickly correct the problem. Turns out, she was the one who put them up. Oops! :)

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    1. oh no! what did she say? hopefully she realized that it's better to hear it from a teacher than for the superintendent to walk in and correct her...or a student. i guess we have to take our humiliation in measures...

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  5. When you write in all lowercase, many of your readers have the same reaction as you did to the "breath" sign- it's sloppy and embarrassing. It takes extra effort to read your posts, and it feels like my blood pressure is slowly climbing as I scroll through your archives. It's a shame, because your content is really good. If it's time prohibitive to do it yourself(ves), you could turn on the option in Word or use another program that will automatically capitalize "I" and anything that comes after a period.

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    1. i'm sorry you find the reading of our blog so taxing. our choices to skip capitalization are stylistic in nature and are not due to our lack of ability. it is meant to set us apart from other blogs. there is one word to describe your reaction and subsequent post regarding our punctuation or lack thereof. that word; "success." thanks for your comment. it made our day.

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