The Grammar Guru Goes Gaga
I want to remark briefly on a phenomenon that strikes unexpectedly and with sometimes disastrous results—but I don’t know what to call it. “SpellusĀ confustibus” comes to mind, as does “Frozen Brain Syndrome.” If I hadn’t had to pay the tax man, I would have a Name That Glitch contest.
Sometimes your brain will freeze up when you look at a word, and you will sit there telling yourself that of course “cow” is spelled C-O-W, but your brain tells you, “No, that just doesn’t look right.” So you go and look it up, sure enough, you are right and your brain is wrong. Don’t believe me? Stare at a word and say it repeatedly in your mind, and see how long it takes you to think, “Man, that is one weird looking word! Is it spelled right?”
This happened to me moments ago as I added the “lose/loose” entry to my last post. The word “lose” looked wrong. The impression that it was wrong was so incredibly strong that I had to go and look the word up in the dictionary to convince myself that my mind was on the fritz again.
My message to you is: when “spellus confustibus” strikes, go ahead and look it up, even if you are sure it’s just a brain glitch. Exactly three times in my life, the “glitch” turned out to be correct after all. And the rest of the times, well, I got a good dose of confidence that I really had this spelling thing down pat.
4 Comments
I HATE When That Happens!
I admit it! Ay yam and baad spellar. It’s a wonder I ever made it to the spelling bee finals in grade school. I can’t spell worth a darn. But I do know that sometimes a word just looks wrong even when I am absolutely positive it is correct. The word I most commonly have that problem with is “the.” T-H-E never looks right to me.
I have that too! But most of the time, it’s my fault. Haha. I would do something like put a ‘s’ instead of a ‘c’, then I’d sit there all day, sounding out the word, but it just looks wrong. š
Editormum – When it hits me, I get up and go get myself a cup of hot
green tea. It is supposed to be good for thinking — both that and the little bit of change while going to get it.
Editor: Oh, yes! This happened to me just a couple of hours ago when I was editing an article my son wrote. I checked the word out three or four times. It was the word “audible.” Did I spell it right?