The Spell Chequer and Eye

Ahhhh spelling, you elusive whore, where to begin, my Achilles heel, my Waterloo, my Zumba class. I've never been a good speller. There, it's out, you know now. I sometimes fare no better with punctuation but spelling will always be my nemesis (the bollox!). So what possessed me to suddenly start writing? Why, sure doesn't everything have 'Spell Check' nowadays. No I mean, I know it's my problem and eventually I might take up a class or something to correct this wrong (it would be more imperative for me to learn German at the moment however).

For now I will have to make do with the humble 'Spell Check' to set me on my path to righteous wordings. It also doesn't help matters that I spent the years after I left college, bastardising the English language, my wordplay became one of (and still is), double entendres, merging of words to create new ones, repetitious ramblings, numerous new words for poo and melding popular entertainment quotations into everyday situations. Nerds!
An example of which would be when a friend of mine began to refer to her the top of her boyfriends butt-crack as his ‘Poot’, a word I decided to take on with relish as it was incredibly fun to say. To my detriment, as eventually I managed to work the word into my day to day (don’t ask me how) with people who weren’t in the know. Suddenly I would be presented with two paths to take and a bemused looking face. Take the blue pill, continue down the rabbit hole and try to explain the meaning of ‘Poot’ to my conversee or take the red pill, stay in Kansas and brush it off like it never happened.

GBM: 'No I said I want you to rub my Boot, feel the quality of the leather' (nice save)

Another thing I occasionally do is begin using words or popular slang in an ‘ironic’ way for laughs only for the words I intended to mock or belittle to become my norm.

I once decided, wouldn’t it be indeed incredibly ‘ironic’ if I started using the word ‘tubular’ constantly to denote when I thought some thing, one or a situation was great. The irony being that it was 2008 and the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ had not been popular for over 10 years. I was bringing it back, con sarn it. It was ‘most amazing’ in 2006 (who was I Bill S. Preston, Esq) but my current ironic foible is possibly one most horrid. I am currently having an ironic love affair with the semi-word, ‘totes’, short for totally for anyone not under 16 years of age. I know, I know it’s so awful but what’s worse is I am genuinely beginning to fall for this irksome put. I mean the face alone Husband makes when I use the word in public is priceless to my twisted sense of humor (a kind of, nose squish of disgust) and then on special occasions if I really want to get a kick from his reaction I unleash the one-two sucker-punch of ‘totes amazballs’ (his eyes once rolled so hard they actually almost popped out of their sockets).

The point being is that because of this bad linguistic behavior, my spelling appears to have gone to pot. To reiterate I’ve had to develop a trusting simpatico with the ‘Spell Check’ of most computer miscellany but he can’t always save me from myself.

So yo check this (again being ironic, don’t actually speak street at all), new job, customer facing role, business to business and one where I usually would send almost a hundred emails a day to important business clients. I kicked ass at this job, excelled and I managed to work on and nip this spelling malarkey in the butt....................................................................... or so I thought.

Two years in, I’m shooting the shit in the staff canteen with my Closest Work Colleague and she decides to drop the mother of all bombshells.

GBM: 'My spelling is atrocious but I think I am managing'

CWC: 'Oh yeah I’ve seen some of your emails, ha ha I’ve always found the way you spell morning hilarious.'

GBM: 'What ever do you mean?'

CWC: 'Eh you spell it with a U, as in ‘MOURNING’, as in grieving some ones death.'

GBM: 'Fuck off.' (Irishism, non-aggressive use, similar to Americanism ‘Shut up’ or Get out’)

CWC: 'No seriously you do.'

Every email I’ve ever sent containing the offending article suddenly darted across my mind like a conveyor belt of shame.

• ‘Good Mourning Sir’
• ‘I will have those reports over to you first thing in the mourning’
• ‘Apologies for the delay on this, I’ve been up to my eyes all mourning’
• Worst of all I once left out the ‘the’ from one of my sentences and sent this sacrilege ‘I’m very sorry I cannot answer your query, our systems are down and in mourning’ (the rest of the sentence did go ‘they might be back online’ so the context may not have been lost but Jesus God man)

GBM: 'Oh my God two years, two years, why are you only telling me this now?'

CWC: 'I guess it only now just clicked into place to mention it to you.'

At this point I let out a mighty loud gasp of desperation and fetaled into mortification.

At what point in my life did I begin to add this extra u? I bet that all of the clients I dealt with on daily basis have an image of me as a depressed nutcase who always dresses in black, forever grieving a lover lost out at sea.

I’ve learned from this mistake and do spell morning correctly but I now live in a sort of fear that I may never be spared from future embarrassment until the day a ‘Contextual Spell Checker’ is invented. One that knows that a ‘mourning’ cannot be in fact ‘good’ for this is a contradiction in terms, unless you are a member of ‘The Adams Family’. The day it is ready for release I will be first in line.

Utter shame meltdown.

GBM