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"Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones. A writer with a mind that doesn’t register how words are spelled tends to see through the words he encounters — straight to the things, characters, ideas, images and emotions they conjure. A good speller, by contrast — the kind who never fails to clock the idiosyncratic orthography of 'algorithm' or 'Albert Pujols' — tends to see language as a system. Good spellers are often drawn to poetry and wordplay, while bad spellers, for whom language is a conduit and not an end in itself, can excel at representation and reportage."
The quoted bit from that essay does sound like somebody making shit up. But the rest of it is, yup, sorry, right, too bad. I have a friend whose book was published full of typos that the ESL copyeditor had introduced.
@Annie K.: I dunno. I am a super-OCD copy editor, and it is a GIANT pain in the ass to turn that off and just say what I want to say. I would call it probably the second-hardest part of writing for me, actually. Made up or not, rings true to me.
@Moff I love to pieces a super-OCD copy editor. I LOVE those people. And I sympathize because I wouldn't know how to turn that off either. But I don't understand what rings true to you — are you a good speller or a bad one?
@Annie K.: I'm a good speller! And it is very hard to see through the words to the things, characters, ideas, images, and emotions they conjure.
@Moff: The use/mention switch! It opens a trap door. Suddenly everything has a story. It's worse than living in the city and wanting to just look at everyone. Better off seeing just the words.
@Moff Me too! But maybe you're better. Anyway, I'm also hyper-aware of what the words refer to — so given that I don't fit her good/bad model, I feel sure the model must be wrong.
I love when I read something on the Times's site, and I want to email it to myself, so I click "Email this story" at the bottom. And then I remember that they want you to fucking sign in first, and it's just, like, fuck you — I copy the URL and go to Gmail and just email it to myself that way.
I mean, come the fuck on.
Personally, I like to think of myself as an exuberant, Rebecca Sealfon-like speller.
@katherine I love you for that reference.
What if you used to be an epic speller, a bee-winning speller, and now you can't spell for shit since you got old?
@spiralbetty: No more poetry and wordplay for you, then.
@spiralbetty My typing is slowly getting worse. By the time I'm 30 I will need a typing wand and a copy-editor just to send an IM to someone.
@Bittersweet: Let the world slip, or whatever.
@deepomega SEE WHAT I MEAN? Where did that hyphen come from??
@deepomega: Enchanted typing wand?
@spiralbetty: Something something magic spelling
@spiralbetty: Enchanted wands seem more appropriate for the Batman/Superman post, somehow…
Heffernan roolz.
I don't know how you could graduate from a late 20th century Catholic school and not be a good speller. But the skill degrades with age, for sure.
Meanwhile, people like me – who are both terrible at spelling and at ideas – usually excel at frottage.
@BadUncle I herd bad spellers exell as sex partners. Or so Ive been toled.
Anecdotally (sp?) most people I encounter who don't spell good also don't read too good or write too good either. Usually, they are the type of people who barely read at all. I know I know, there are some big counterexamples of big fancypants writers who are terrible spellers. Like, for instance, I believe F. Scott Fitzgerald was known for being a terrible speller. But all of the bad spellers I've known personally are borderline illiterate.
@ericdeamer grammar, on the other hand, is one giant grey area of mistakes, e.g., good vs. well.
@whizzard 'Don't read/write to good' reads as a very deliberate 'mistake' to me.
@the teeth You are correct. A sort of mild, meaningless "joke" so one should be forgiven for missing it.
That quote sounds like something a bad speller would write. Probably can't diagram a sentence, either (now THERE'S a skill that deteriorates with age/distance between you and Catholic school).
I was gonna suggest that you people should make your alphabet phonetic, but then I remembered how suggesting the switch to metric system usually works out.
Spelling and writing both are skills that can be sharpened, depending on one's motivation or lack of it. Maybe the link between writing and spelling is intention, rather than predilection?