I was telling a friend about card games and I mentioned 'pinochile' and I pronounced it 'PIE-no-kyle' and he howled.

I used to be a spelling bee runner up (partly ADD related social anxiety and never studied the book)...
Brain still works to a degree, but my fingers are bloody stupid, lol.

Over all, I wasn't too bad at it. Just a few here and there. The other was bureau. I can't remember how I used to mistakenly spell it.

I assume you spelled it "pinochle" at the time.

to spell it than to explain to someone who knows zero anout it how it's played.

I knew how to spell 7 of them correctly.

I always got my they're, there an their mixed up.

Marseille
Charleston Heston

Telling my sister, "Mom went next store." And that's how I spelled it.

Took me a while to realize it was actually "next door."

A teacher caught me and I have it correct now.

Tikki

Like solid and steadfast.

Last edited Tue Sep 3, 2024, 03:00 AM - Edit history (2)

She was great though. One of my very best teachers. She marched me down to
the school library and said find a book you'd like to read and then come tell me
about what you learned. Not on paper, I want to hear you speak to the story.

"A Tale of Two Cities"..Charles Dickens.. I cried when we talked about the story.
She understood.
Tikki

Had problems with ‘their’ always switching the I and e…I’d add on an ‘e’ at the end of bothe. 😂

of the i before e rule

Still end up spelling it e before i. Then immediately know it is wrong.

pronunciation in English.

My spelling was pretty bad for most of my childhood.

The word ‘mixed’ just didn’t look right to me 🤨

Wrong

I spelled it lisence for years but more recently auto correct and spell check bail me out. I had to come up with a mnumonic: C comes before S in the alphabet and C comes first in the word license. Seems some things that I mix up like that just stay mixed up in my brain and I’m remembering the wrong way.

Thank goodness for spill chick.

But then I got a job in the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit. And I coached an Odyssey of the Mind team, and Ive never spelled this wrong again.

To this day, my face still reddens with humiliation when I read it

If the word refers to a person, such as chief, the I is before E
If the word refers to an object, such as reign, the E is before the I (I'm not sure I'm describing the kind of noun correctly)

I believe it has helped me achieve a better level of correct spelling. So my niece says

One of my favorite bosses was so good that whenever I asked him how to spell a word he'd always just say the part I was having trouble with. He always knew.

I jokingly call "autocorrect" "autocorrupt" but I'm secretly grateful despite all the times it gets it wrong.

It does help a lot of the time, but sometimes it puts a word that was totally different from the one I wanted.

I knew a quarter was 25 cents, so I somehow thought that a quarter hour was 25 minutes. Guess I figured it was one of those words like "dozen" that was another way to refer to a number

Actually, it was only one time. Spelling wasn't usually a problem, but second grade was a bit challenging in that regard: we lived in Colorado and the teacher was from the deep South. For years Mom kept the spelling test on which I'd written what I'd heard -- aig. Even the teacher laughed, and she told Mom that she was encouraged to work on her pronunciation.


.

makes a big difference. I was so embarrassed. I was born and went to school in a nearby city. Have lived in a town nearby my entire life.

There is a street called Leicester. I was always pronouncing it Liechester. I was doing research for the City Attorney, and the City Manager heard me say it that way once.

He said, "it's pronounced Lester. I Iived in Maine most of my life, and even I know how to say it." I was so embarrassed. I laughed though and said, "well then they just should have spelled it that way to begin with." He laughed too.

it was my major in grad school. I always spelled it haprischord. I had a heck of a time getting my fingers to type it correctly.

That helped tremendously. When I see some word--an important word or name-- misspelled I get a bit triggered, but I don't typically comment.

But, in my experience, not focusing on reading in the early years of elementary school, but rather focusing on "Phonics" (as was the case in the 80s) was a BIG MISTAKE. One learns spelling, grammar, vocabulary, cognitive development, and language construction from reading. I really don't (largely) care how it "sounds." ( --off soapbox-- )

Totally agree with you on this. My husband is not well educated - he did not graduate from high school. But he can read and he reads a lot! He is actually very smart, just not well educated. He knows a lot of things on Jeopardy!
It is a mistake to confuse education with intelligence. (I know a lot of well-educated idiots! Some of them are doctors!)

I remember the public school here adopted what was deemed spell it like it sounds in the late 60's, early seventies. The Catholic School I went to refused to teach it that way.

I guess the public school teachers wouldn't even count it as a misspelled word as long as they could figure out what word you meant to use.

Years later a college English professor said to me, when handing back my first assignment, "you went to Catholic School didn't you?" I asked how he knew. He replied, "you know how to spell correctly, and construct a complete sentence." A few weeks later he had us correct each other's papers to teach editing skills. I saw what he meant. I felt so bad for the student whose paper I got. I had red correction marks all over it. I went up to the professor, and I said, "do I really have to be the one to give it back, I don't want to hurt their feelings." He said, "Yes. You're helping. They need to learn how to write properly, if they ever want to get a professional job."

I am usually a very good speller and pretty good with grammar. But one day in fourth grade, I had a brain melt down and could not spell "of". I came up with uv, uf, ahf, ov, - after about two minutes of sweating and thinking that I had a stroke or something, it came to me.
Ridiculous! But I haven't had trouble with it since!

I always wondered why there was an "i" in "business." I spelled it "busness."

I still have problems with rhythm. I would have gotten it wrong there, except for spell check.

even to this day i spell it with the way mom told me , to get her. then i run it together

My brain always wanted to spell it with two c's and one s. And even if my brain knew ir was wrong, my hand would slip out of habit. It wasn't until I started studying Latin that I started to get ir right. Fortunately, that was still in junior high so I had it right by the time I got to college.

… and broke them up into segments that made a kind of sense. Carried the card around for years, then forgot it in some papers where it turned up decades later.

The only word I can remember now is DEFINITE. Maybe it was something in the way I pronounce it: de-feh-nit. There’s nothing “finite” about it, but I broke it up as
DE — FINITE.

I dreaded spelling bees!

I've gotten better. Still not top level.