Tag Archives: English

Proofing and Editing

Spell check

Excerpt from:

Island Life, (about Marion Island) by Tiara Walters in Lifestyle Magazine (Sunday Times), 27 March 2011

This excerpt is from a premier South African Sunday newspaper. The article is about Marion Island in the South Atlantic. It references an interaction with an Antarctic fur seal. So sad that no-one checks these columnists work and that they appear to rely on Spell check – which is notoriously literal and unable to discriminate when picking words.

…..and flourishes her walking stick to ward off an Antarctic fur seal as it galumphs towards us, barking and bearing its teeth and looking anything but cute.

I have been bearing (I have borne…), my teeth all my life but when I show them, whether to grin or grimace, I bare them – the seal would have been baring its teeth pretty much like the one in the picture?

My life

Misled…

I love reading and, as a child, my reading was always years ahead of my age.

As a result, I had a pretty good vocabulary from an early age.

The pitfall is that no one is teaching you, so you GET it but you do not necessarily know how to SAY it.

For years the most misleading thing in my life was that I thought MISLED was pronounced MYZILLED. I DID, really, I did but for some reason I had never been conscious of speaking it  correctly – my mental autopilot just used it I suppose but I never connected it to my READING misapprehension.

My EUREKA moment came one day when the word MISLEAD occurred in what I was reading. Of course!…the present tense of MISLED that I had heard, understood – and even spoken – so many times, while my brain had persisted with MYZILLED! I looked around guiltily for a moment, as if everyone knew my little secret!

Years later I was listening to a discussion programme and a woman told how her father had always read MISLED as MYZILLED – suddenly I was not alone.