As I prepared to preside over this year’s school spelling bee, I looked over the word list to make sure I would pronounce words correctly and to eliminate some words in advance that I felt didn’t have a place in the bee. I took out the first 24 words since they were simply too easy and would make the bee drag on. I decided against a few others because of difficulty to pronounce correctly or just words I had not heard before (whiskery?).
I realized there is no such thing as too easy a word anymore. Despite the fact that all our spellers made it through at least two rounds before missing a word says more about their functionality as good spellers than it does about the ease of the words. I would guess there were a number of middle school students who would have missed words like “could.”
What has happened to spelling? We used to take great pride in spelling words correctly. I still remember how upset I was in third grade when I missed my only word the entire year. I was devastated!
The first downfall was the advent of spell-check on computers. I’m not nearly as good at spelling as I used to be since I don’t really have to think too hard about words. Prime example: As I typed the last sentence of the previous paragraph, my computer automatically changed the spelling of devastated since I had put an “e” after the “v.” Words like that are auto-corrected without even a thought.
A big problem with this is that students will run spell-check, but still misspell words. How is this possible? A prime example is students’ use of the word definitely.
Teenagers love this word. However, many of them spell it as defiantly. I couldn’t figure out such an egregious error for a long time. Finally, I was watching as one student was trying to spell definitely and saw the auto-correct change the misspelled word to defiantly.
Spell-check will also not tell you if it should be to/too/two or there/their/they’re or your/you’re. Gone are the days where we would ponder a homophone to remember if we should use its or it’s. If there is not a red or green line under a word, most people don’t worry about it anymore.
Another issue, of course, is texting. I don’t text much because I still insist on capitalizing words, spelling them correctly, and using apostrophes. Thus, it takes me a long time to peck out a text.
Most of my students could read my column headline better than we adults. This is their version of English. Why use more space or time than is necessary to get your message across? That seems to be the mantra of Generation Text (my new term for this generation). We old fuddy-duddies can stick with our full words and lack of abbreviations, but kids look on us as dinosaurs.
And they might be correct. Much as it pains me, I see the changes happening. I don’t think I’ll ever accept u instead of you in a paper, but we’re inching somewhat faster than glacier speed toward a language revolution. OMG.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is discombobulated, which means upset or frustrated, as in, “The English teacher was so discombobulated by the bad spelling that he dropped his red pen.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!