A Few Classes Short of a Major

I have great sympathy for politicians who embarrass themselves at elementary schools by misspelling words like tomato or potato. (Or is it potatoe?) If elementary school students ever ask me to spell a word for them, I’ll tell them to look it up.

I’m joking. What I’ll really say is, “Boys and girls, have you heard about that wonderful computer feature called spellcheck? There’s also a program which checks grammar, but I’m not sure it knows any more than I do, which isn’t very much.” Then the teacher will say, “Well, Mrs. Rosby. I think that’s all we have time for today. Thank you for visiting.” And she’ll shoo me out of the classroom and shake her head disapprovingly as I leave.

People expect good spelling and grammar from someone with a journalism major and an English minor, which I’m proud to say I have, and from a fine university too. But remember, it’s an English minor, not an English major. If I’d had the wherewithal to take a few more classes, I’d have an English major and I might have been able to spell wherewithal without help from my spellchecker.

I might also know if the minor in English minor should be capitalized or not, because the websites I checked are inconsistent. Capitalization can be tricky for an English minor—or an English Minor. Maybe for English miners too.

One of the dumbest mistakes I’ve ever made in an essay—or at least one of the dumbest I’ll admit to—involved capitalization. I once wrote about buying a raffle ticket for an afghan, only I capitalized it. So it appeared that instead of a cozy, handmade blanket, I was hoping to win a person from Afghanistan—and for just one dollar! Unfortunately I didn’t win either one. An afghan would be nice, but an Afghan could cook me the food of his homeland, leaving me to lie around the house before supper. Or would it be lay around the house?

I wouldn’t be asking if I had an English major. I’d know exactly when to use lie instead of lay and fewer instead of less. As it is, I have to consult the internet, and then I have to go lie down.

I also have to be very careful with words like there, their, to, too, two, bare and bear, because as you know, to plus too does not equal for, and a bear behind is very different from a bare behind.

These kinds of mistakes are embarrassing to writers if only because they’re so entertaining to readers. Some readers find joy in reading what you write. Others find joy in pointing out your grammar and spelling errors. I don’t have much patients for that. I mean patience.

Being acutely aware of my own grammar and usage problems has not, in the least, kept me from being entertained by the failings of others. A friend once claimed to be on the urge of a nervous breakdown instead of the verge of a nervous breakdown. I was on the verge of urging her to stop being overdramatic.

I once heard a speaker say a particular celebrity was being indicted into a Hall of Fame of some sort. I suppose that could have been appropriate, depending on which Hall of Fame it was. And whenever I see an advertisement that reads, “Just $3 for children,” I can’t help but think, “Wow! I paid a lot more for mine.”

But before I judge anyone else harshly, I remind myself of another really embarrassing mistake I made. I once confused the words latter and former in a column about insomnia. I meant to say, “Late night phone calls generally fall into two categories: tragic or obscene. If it’s the former and someone is dead, they’ll still be that way in the morning. If the caller was obscene, they’ll still be that way in the morning too.”

That’s what I meant to say. But I typed in latter instead of former, making it deadly to be obscene and confusing the only reader who had made it that far in my column. Someone with an English major would never have done that. An English Major either.

(Dorothy Rosby is the author of three books of humorous essays including Alexa’s a Spy and Other Things to Be Ticked off About, Humorous Essays on the Hassles of Our Time.)