Weekly Geekery
Spelling is important even when you are stealing money. An app for your mental health. Google wants to blend physical and digital books. Music unites us.
...morePosts Tagged: Spelling
Spelling Reformed
At The Awl, Annie Abrams gives the history of a 19th-century newspaper, Di Anglo-Sacsun, and its editors’ attempts to make literacy more available to the public, by developing their own phonetic alphabet that the newspaper was written in. Abrams also dives into the controversy surrounding the name of the paper: Andrews and Boyle pointedly explained that […]
...moreSpellbound
Unaccustomed, vicious, onomatopoeia… We all have that one word we can never spell correctly. Paris Review blogger Sadie Stein’s was “Wednesday.” “It’s like a mental block,” she writes, “or maybe, an increased reliance on technology.” Read the rest of the mini-essay here.
...moreNo Wonder We Need Spelling Bees to Remember It All
Silent letters, multiple possible sounds per letter, counterintuitive letter combinations…why is English spelling so damn weird? David Crystal, author of linguistic history Spell It Out, explains the numerous and conflicting forces that, both intentionally and not, warped our orthography. Just one of many fascinating anecdotes: …Flemish typesetters didn’t know English well, so spelled some words in […]
...moreFWIW
“We are living in a moment of seismic linguistic change, and attention should be paid—but not to errors. Our changing language signals evolution, not degradation. ‘OK,’ the most popular American word in the world, was invented during the age of the telegraph, because it was concise.” Anne Trubek asks “Should We Care About Grammar and […]
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