In the beginning, dictionaries were prescriptive. They told you how to spell in an attempt to create a national unified identity. Kings and Queens discovered it's much easier to rule over a unified culture and population with a standardized language and shared set of values than a collection of principalities with weird accents and traditions. This was basically the start of Nationalism, and a little-acknowledged fact is that the Dictionary played a big part in how Nationalism played out.
Dictionaries fascinate me. They are magical spell books and I spent hours in my youth reading through the impossibly thin pages - the older the dictionary the better. Words like spiniferous (having or containing spines) I haven't seen used since. But modern words like embiggens or doh weren't there yet.
That's a big change with dictionaries in the 20th Century. They went from prescriptive to descriptive.
I suspect it was the time that Nationalism really fell out of fashion, the second half of the 20th Century, that people began to look around and notice what they had lost. I'll pick on England because that's the history I know best.
From the outside, England looks homogenous. Everyone drinks tea and beer, speaks English, has a shared history and values.
And yet, that's not exactly true.
Not so long ago, each village was an isolated and interconnected culture. With their own traditions, vocabulary, meanings, histories, recipes. My family's scones recipe doesn't look or taste at all like something you would find at High Tea in London (it tastes so much better).
When I went back to the part of England where my family was from, I was fascinated that everyone in that village had the same "speech impediment" I did. This is the part of England Chaucer came from and until about 1960, they were still spelling words with that giant F/S letter we never see anymore. And by the start of the 21st Century, were still speaking as if this letter was part of their world.
But even this is fading. The traditions, the language, all this is almost gone. It's too late that people realized how much stronger these unique histories and cultures and languages of each village made the nation.
That's where dictionaries have become more important than ever. They record the language as it is used at that moment in time. Language constantly changes (just look at how the word decimate has evolved to include all the things desolate used to cover). So too are dictionaries. That's why they constantly publish updates.
A dictionary is no longer a dictator of language and culture, it is a documenter of how real humans use language and how that changes over time.
We forget this and ask dictionaries how to write. Please help us conform to the "proper" or "correct" way.
The problem with dictionaries is the same problem I have with modern spellcheck programmes - You have to know enough about how to spell the word to be able to look up how to spell the word.
Learning to read and write was a struggle to me. As an adult, I've been diagnosed with Dyslexia, but not in the place where I live, so I'm not eligible for help. But this wasn't something people thought about when I was a kid.
School was daily tears with the teacher publically explaining to me how lazy I am, that I'm purposefully disrupting the class by not being able to read out loud from the textbook or misspelling simple words when told to write on the chalkboard. Write them out 100 times in front of the class while everyone else got a reward for passing that day's quiz. And write them out again and again at home. Write them out until you learn them. Stay behind for extra homework for your failure.
Public shaming and writing out words over and over again didn't help me spell any better. I think it made it worse.
I know it made it worse.
I'm stupid. I'm lazy. I don't try hard enough. I can't grasp simple spelling. I can't read fast enough. I'm a terrible student. I need to try harder.
Each of these creates an emotional block that is between me and learning how to spell.
The thing is, I actually can learn how to spell. But I'm slow. Maybe one or two words per month if I put my mind to it and clear away the emotional fog that gets in the way.
That's why I started blogging just as soon as I became an adult. An active attempt to improve myself.
But I'm still heavily dependent on technology to be legible.
Technology is flawed. It's not great at contextual spelling. Most days it shuts down as "no known language detected."
Apparently, dyslexia is not a dialect spellcheckers are good at. Aknolaged becomes annotated when run through a high end (and expensive) spellcheck and our brains aren't always able to catch the mistakes in the 'correction'.
It takes tremendous courage to write publically. Every word is an opportunity to be exposed to ridicule for not being good enough. For failing to meet the standard.
When I was in high school, there was a man with a hook for a hand. It was sort of a hook, sort of a clamp. It was something we were told not to talk about.
The thing I remember most was that, unlike with me, not one of the teachers loudly corrected him on how to hold a pen. It wouldn't do any good anyway, he didn't have fingers to adjust to the correct grip. He just clamped it in his hook and wrote.
His lack of fingers exempted him from the public criticism of not being able to grip the pen according to how the textbooks said we should.
That's the memory that stood out strongest. It was enough that he could write at all. He was rewarded for achieving what he shouldn't be able to do.
Now I understand a bit more about dyslexia and how much I need that mechanical aid (spellchecker who can handle my typings without shutting down in a nervous wreck).
I also understand that there are people in the world who feel physical pain when they see a word misspelt and want to help by correcting this tremendous wrong in the world.
They do so publically and loudly.
On forums, this might be someone replying to a comment with a lecture on how you got the wrong homonym. Nothing to do with the topic of the conversation, but then others pile on and also "help" by explaining the mistakes made. (it's also a common troll trick to discredit the other writer if the conversation wasn't going their way)
I wonder if they would tell the man with a hook for a hand how to hold a pen correctly? Somehow, I don't think they would.
What these public correctors don't understand is that we don't deliberately try to spell things wrong.
Writing in public is an act of courage.
What to them seems like a minor thing to help someone spell better has the opposite effect. It's a loud and public shaming.
It decreases the likelihood of being able to spell that word correctly in the future.
What's more, these little acts of 'helping' shuts people out of the world of writing.
When I was in university, it was estimated that about 20% of the English Speaking population has a language disability strong enough to impair their daily existence. Add to that, people who learn English as a second language and people who acquire language processing issues as they live their lives, and so on and etc... that's a lot of people who must build up the courage to interact with the world of writing. And who mostly don't. They avoid it. They have little to no voice in our society.
We talk about the 21st century being years of enlightenment and equality and equity - and yet because this massive segment of the population has no strong voice on the internet - a world still dominated by the written word. Their/our story isn't heard.
Publically helping people spell better is simply shutting a gate on their face. It's prescriptive dictionaries all over again - building a unified nationalism and culture where people with invisible disabilities are unwelcome. Where I am unwelcome.
This is my ask to you: If you see a misspelling on the internet, first ask yourself "is the writing understandable even with the wrong word in there?" Most of the time it doesn't matter and it isn't hurting anyone to leave it alone.
If the error makes the meaning unclear, then quietly and privately send the person a note saying "hey, I noticed you were having trouble with this word - can you clarify you meant such and such? And thanks for sharing what you had to say. I value your words enough to take the time to want to understand better." (adjust it to fit your style)
Chances are those kind words will remove several emotional bricks from their wall of awful and help them spell that word better in the future.
And there you have it. I've changed nothing in the world with my words. One defective voice whispering in a hurricane of righteousness. If anyone manages to read this far, it certainly won't be the people who need it most. In the end, I've just written this for myself, and that's okay too.
