Running for Secratary

My daughter couldn’t  spell worth a dam. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). She is 23 now and I think she has improved dramatically.  Momma’s proud of you, sweetie.  She blamed her years of  weak spelling intelligence on Mrs. Zappacosta,  her first and second grade teacher. I tried to work with her on her spelling list each week.  She did fine on the tests. She ran for “secratary” one year and wouldn’t let me help her with her posters. It’s actually a funny slogan…if you meant it to be funny. Like “Do the WRITE Thing…vote of Alex”. Things like that.

 But,I just think people are born bad spellers. I really do. And there’s some people who can’t for the world look a name up in the phone book because they suck at ABC order. Just like handwriting. Can you really learn to write? I don’t think so. My son writes so small, a magnifiying glass doesn’t even do the trick.

 Anywho, it was hard to read her little messages to me when she was little.  For example,

“Im so sary I brok uor kandel. Im so vry vry sary. lov, Alexandra”. 

My heart just melts when I think of her so small, looking up at me with “future bad speller” written all over her face.  But, you know, there’s spell-checker nowadays. She will be fine. Maybe that’s why she majored in Spanish and minored in French. And took two years of Japanese. And is learning Russian. Maybe, just maybe, the English spelled weird to begin with. Take these words that

Like a speller in a candy store.

need to be crossed out forever:

Wednesday (should be Wensday, we all know that)

February ( Febuary is how we all pronounce it. So, take the damn “r” out of the equation)

height- this one just pisses me off… height-eight…why shouldn’t they sound the same. Stupid English people.

fiery-  Ok, someone lights a fire, which makes it fiery…Uh, no…should be firey. Someone should have just asked me.

foreign-  the king will reign in a foreign land.  Should sound the same. This is getting redundant. But, I’m proving a point. My poor little girl didn’t have a chance. Spelling is stupid.

colonel- I mean, really?  This sounds like kernel, the piece of corn, but yet the ranked army man gets his spelled differently, so different that my fourth graders pronounced it, “call-on-ul”. And they look at me like I’m lost my mind when I say, “No, poor confused children, it is colonel (kernel)”.

medieval- But, yet, we spell a bad person, “evil.”, but if it is in olden days of Merry (there’s another one) England, it is medieval. This needs to change to medevil, but then there ya go again…devil is pronounced differently..it should sound like dee vil  then. I’m getting mad. Well, not really, but you know..

separate- People always spell this word wrong. I missed this word on a spelling bee when I was little. It must have bothered me, because I still remember what the word was, even though I have no idea where I just put my car keys.

sergeant- This is just so wrong. Another serviceman gets special spelling. It shouldn’t be “ser-geant”. The word is sar-gent. And that’s how it should be spelled. Done.

their/there/they’re- As a fourth grade teacher, I can tell you that they just don’t care how it is spelled. They really don’t.

criticize- Size but with a “c”. No wonder no one wants to learn English. I’m thinking of learning Spanish so I can avoid this from now on. Si.

ecstasy- How hard would it be to put an X in this one? I mean, really. It should be extacy. I’m so right. (or write, wright)

Fahrenheit- As a teacher, this one gets to me. We named our temperature scale after a German physicist, which is all well and good, but we could have Americanized it to Fairinheight. I mean, the English took Giovanni Cabato and changed his name to Sir John Cabot. Why didn’t we do something like that?  No wonder we just use a “F” by the degree symbol.

pigeon-I don’t know where to begin.

raspberry-sigh…..razzberry. This is not hard to understand.

  Ok, I can’t do anymore. Just know that there are hundreds thousands of words that are spelled wrong, according to me.

If  eye had sum thyme, eye wood look four moor.

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