I have a little problem.<\/p>\n
My font of English has been permanently defiled.<\/p>\n
(That’s a Sherlock Holmes reference, for people unfamiliar with the quote. Comes from “His Last Bow.”)<\/p>\n
My sense of spelling and punctuation was ruined at a very young age thanks to Tolkien, Lewis, and Doyle. I was reading books punctuated in the English style, spelled in the English style, alongside books spelled in the American style, punctuated in the American style. Why shouldn’t a single quote serve as a marker for dialogue? Do I really need to drop the “U”s from various and sundry words? It’s the same language<\/i>, right?<\/p>\n
At times I think I sound and come across as authentically American as Perpugillium Brown…<\/p>\n
Usually, it’s not an issue. Spell check is a wonderful<\/i> thing—I just have to remember not to add the obviously correctly-spelled-for-England words to my custom dictionaries. (And don’t thinK I’ve haven’t gone through on occasion and nuked the custom dictionary file for my own safety.)<\/p>\n
On a random note, I’m listening to a Tom Petty album I haven’t had in the CD player in at least five years—his soundtrack album for Ed Burns’ film <\/i>She’s the One. The song “Walls (Circus)” brings back memories I <\/i>wasn’t expecting. Anyhoo…<\/i><\/p>\n
As I was saying, spelling and punctuation usually<\/i> isn’t an issue. Except that I’ve discovered recently, it is<\/i> an issue.<\/p>\n
You see, because my brain for thirty years has said that British and American spellings are both<\/I> right, I don’t notice the differences. At work, then, when I’m working with text from a British publisher—Doctor Who Magazine<\/i>, for instance—I’ve had to make myself look<\/i> at it several times, just to make sure I’m catching all the misspelled-for-the-American-market words. It takes a couple of passes, and I catch them.<\/p>\n
I just don’t notice. Because they don’t look wrong<\/i> to me. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a little problem. My font of English has been permanently defiled. (That’s a Sherlock Holmes reference, for people unfamiliar with the quote. Comes from “His Last Bow.”) My sense of spelling and punctuation was ruined at a very young age thanks to Tolkien, Lewis, and Doyle. I was reading books punctuated in theContinue reading “On Spelling and Punctuation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[357,358,4102],"class_list":["post-1241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-english","tag-punctuation","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}