So…I’m a good speller. Like, a really good speller. Spelling bee winner throughout grade school, etc. It’s just always come very naturally and effortlessly for me; I’m a man of unremarkable intelligence in most areas, but I’ve always been a perfect speller for whatever reason.
So imagine my shock a week or two ago, when I realized that not only have I been spelling the word embalm (and its whole extended family: embalmed, embalming, etc.) incorrectly my whole life, I’ve been saying it and hearing it incorrectly in my head.
In my head and on paper, it had always been “enbalm,” with an n. Since it isn’t a word that comes up much when slamming out copy at a doctor’s office (unless it was a really incompetent doctor, I guess), it wasn’t until just recently that I had Microsoft Word underline it for me. I instantly went, “no way,” and in 60 seconds of googling, the walls came crumbling down around me. Everything I thought I knew was a lie.
Any words that you only realized as an adult that you had been spelling wrong forever? :smack:
I’m a very good speller, but a while back I learned from the SDMB that the word I had always pictured as sauter (pronounced sotter) was actually spelled solder.
It is, apparently, just dilemma. From the greek di- meaning two and lemma meaning horn. Sensible. Obvious.
Where the hell did I ever get dilemna from? I blame, without evidence, elementary school. Apparently, a common thread between people who learnt the dilemna spelling is that they went to catholic elementary schools. So, as far as I’m concerned this is Mrs. K___'s fault.
It took me a long time, as in I only realized this maybe a year ago, that “everyday” and “every day” were different. I realized the difference in definition all along; I just thought they were both one word.
I’ve always known how to spell everything else, though.
I second Catholic elementary school, plus, I read a lot of comic books then, and THAT’S where I’m sure I’ve seen it. Maybe they went to CES, too.
BIP: amok/amuck - which is it? 2 words, same definition? 2 different words?
My SWAG: Lexical units. Tea party, in the sense of “the thing little girls do with their stuffed animals and their Moms’ clothes” is two words - the noun party, modified by the adjective tea. The noun is the semantically significant word; a tea party is a party where tea is served. So the … agentitive suffix? verbal noun marker? anyway, the -er goes on to party. As per normal English spelling rules, the -y becomes an -i.
However, Tea Party, in the sense of the political movement, is a different kind of word - a name. (Yes, singular “word” - Tea and Party together carry the meaning; semantically, it’s one word.) Names have different rules - their forms don’t change when they’re modified. So one could talk about “Disneylike animation” or a
“Kennedyesque politician” or “Kerryian diplomacy”. Or, a Tea Partyer.
I also had the idea of “dilemna” for a while as a kid, but I never attended a religious school, and generally picked up vocabulary from reading. It might’ve just come from unconsciously applying a general pattern from words like “condemn”.
