I was an English teacher and I remain a horrible speller to this day. I had to be very cautious when preparing materials for students. Learning base words helps, certainly. And learning rules for adding prefixes and suffixes helps too. But I still think that some people have a gift for spelling. I am not one of them.
The longer that I taught and the older I got, the worse my spelling became. Another friend has commented on this same problem.
Is it embarrassed or embarassed or still something else? I noticed last week in rereading my high school research paper that I had misspelled it. Still can’t get it right. And I was in my forties before I finally settled on the correct spelling of weird.
In general, I put my red pencil down 15 years ago. I won’t pick on you if you won’t pick on me.
For me, it’s not a reflection on their intelligence; it’s a sign of apathy, and of not being a very good reader. It indicates a certain unfamiliarity with the written word; not a good sign if I’M hiring. And if they don’t take the effort to get the details write, then they’re not someone I want working for me.
Even here, a poster loses credibility points, as far as I’m concerned. To me being a bas speller means you don’t read much, so I’m not likely to give your position much benefit of the doubt.
I’ve definately done it before. I make it my buisness to occasionaly mess with you spelling and grammer freaks. Yeah, I wierdly mispell things on principal.
For some reason I always have trouble with this word, and if I use it, I allways try to double or even tripple check the spelling before posting, to make sure I have it right.
Also, for apparently no good reason, I allways want to spell tomorrow as tommorow :dubious: . I don’t know why.
My hypothesis as well. When spoken, the vowel sound there in the middle is kinda grunted, providing little obvious clues. Throw in the aforementioned problem with vocabulary-building and it’s an easy but stupid mistake.
Then of course there are those who’d expect a word spelled “definitely” to have the part between the f and the l be pronounced exactly as the free-standing word “finite”.
Logic is neither difficult nor complex. It is simple and basic and natural.
Spelling is arbitrary, has rules that are constantly broken, and requires a particular form of memorization that some people do not bother to grasp. Spelling is complex. Cf. the examples in this thread of “finite”, and “frigate” which would give you absolutely no indication of how to spell “definite”. Actually, they would indicate you should spell it “definate”.
Look, I’m a pretty good speller and have passable grammar, but neither are ends unto themselves. They are means to the ends of “communication”.
Sure, I would hire the guy who spells it definitely instead of definately but not if the second guy understood the validity of the contrapositive and the first guy thought logic was “difficult and complex”.
Bullshit. Logic is not “simple and basic and natural”, and anybody who claims it is doesn’t know jack shit about the subject. For a basic intro to how “unnatural” logic is for the majority of people, and how complex a function it indeed is, try Deborah J. Bennett’s recent Logic Made Easy, which offers plenty of examples of how most people have trouble with the most basic of logical reasoning problems. Or maybe start with the Introducing… series, which has cartoons to aid you.
Language is indeed complex, but mostly in the sense that certain inadequacies in our vocabulary invariably lead to ambiguity and confusion (oversimplification of Wittgenstein; check out also The Power of Babel by John McWorther; for more of the complexity of usage that you’re talking about, try Steven Pinker’s Words And Rules: The Ingredients of Language). Spelling “definitely”, on the other hand, simply requires seeing the word and memorizing it. In fact, in this case, it simply involves memorizing one friggin’ letter. Nice try.
Yeah. Spelling “definitely” correctly requires memorizing one word…
So does spelling
aardvark
braille
ceiling
delineate
.
.
.
zyzzyva
There are hundreds of thousands of words in the language, and definitely is one that by your own admission, appears incorrectly a lot of the time. I don’t know about your browser, but mine doesn’t flag the incorrect ones and put a gold star next to the correct ones.
Yet, there is one system of logic, and, its laws are immutable.
Yes, it’s clear that a lot of people don’t understand it. But don’t claim that spelling is easy and logic is complex when to a lot of us, the exact opposite is true.
You’re trying to obscure the issue by including words like “zyzzyva” and “aardvark” in the argument (a good example of using faulty logic) - if you read the OP, I said it makes you look more stupid to spell an easy word like “definitely”, which pops up in conversation and writing about a million times more than your examples (“ceiling” possibly excepted). And the “nice try” was aimed at your assertions about the naturalness of logic.