Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Spell check not always a writer's friend

My friend and colleague, Dr. Guy Reel, just sent me this piece (click on boldface headline above) about nuances of our English language.

The article, a commentary from the New York Times, talks about these tricky pairs of words:

•straighten and straiten

•gibe and jibe

•teaming and teeming

•insuring and ensuring

5 comments:

SaM-1 said...

WOW... we discussed this in his class on Tuesday. It was very interesting, especially the whole gibe and jibe thing. I had no idea those were words!

Anonymous said...

Speaking of spell check, there is a good program Spell Check Anywhere (SpellCheckAnywhere.Net) it adds spell check to all programs.

Britastic said...

That's interesting, I have never had any problems with those words. Dr. Timbs did you unsubscribe to my blog? Shame, shame! haha

Kathleen Brown said...

Dr. Timbs! Spell check has screwed me over many a time...Anyway your email address keeps rejecting my messages so I figured I'd post my blog here...

http://kathleenb2189.blogspot.com/

It was great talking to you the other day.

:)

carolina magic said...

Hey Kathleen. Yes, spell check is surely not perfect. I once had a student, for example, write about a "toe truck"?

Nuf said!