Writing Tools

This week I'm offering two essays on why good spelling matters, how it can mean the difference between love and lust, between laughter and loss.

But first let me sit in wonder at the realization that, once again, we've made a connection between language and enchantment. Just as we learned that the word glamour was an altered form of grammar, connected by the use of prescribed language as a magical charm, so now we must confront the ancient associations between the spelling of a word and the casting of a spell. Magic words.

The word spell has many important meanings in the history of our language, all of them related to the idea of a story, tale or news. We know, for example, that the word gospel translates from the Old English to good news or good story. All the modern meanings of spell derive from those antique associations.

Consider these definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Spell (as a verb): "To name or set down in order of letters (a word or syllable); to enunciate or write letter by letter; to denote by certain letters in a particular order."

Spell (as a noun): "A set of words, a formula or verse, supposed to possess occult or magical powers; a charm of incantation;  a means of accomplishing enchantment or exorcism."

The word appears in both senses in a number of Shakespeare's plays.

Language and magic. Magic and language. Where is the connection? Think about it this way: When we form letters to compose words, we create something out of nothing, so that the still air or the empty space on a page fills with meaning, as if a wizard created a blizzard from a clear blue sky.

An English professor once asked a class, "How important can spelling be if Shakespeare, the greatest writer in our culture, spelled his name 24 different ways?" As you are about to see, though, incorrect spelling -- a single missing or misplaced letter -- can make all the difference in the world, can turn art into an ars. But first one more digression.

In 50 years of reading newspapers, I can assert, without fear of contradiction, that the word most often misspelled in the daily press is public. Or, perhaps we notice the misspelling of public more often than we notice the botching of accommodate, inoculate or hemorrhage. Without its "l," public descends to pubic. I write this without embarrassment or regret, as I am of the opinion that most stories containing the word public suffer from an omnivorous solemnity anyway, a gravitas turned to levitas by their sudden association with the "down-low." Stories I find unreadable perk up with the appearance of phrases such as "pubic health," "pubic awareness," "pubic opinion," and perhaps my personal favorite, "the pubic square."

And then there was this headline in The Providence Journal a few years ago about our former Secretary of Defense: "Rumsfeld's Pubic Role is Shrinking." (I hate it when that happens.) Barring an admission of sabotage by some guerrilla humorist -- Dave Barry in stiletto heels -- let us assume that the common replacement of public by pubic is an unintended error, typographical or editorial. But what happens when the spelling mistake stems not from inattention, but from ignorance? You are now, oh reader, ready for my parable.

When I was just a little writer, pre-pubescent, growing up in a New York suburb, I began to feel the first tremors of manhood, and I felt them most powerfully in the presence of a local teenage girl whose nickname was "Angel Face." She even wore a brown leather jacket with that name embroidered across the back.

Truth be told, she did have the face of a 1950s style teen angel (not the dead one from the song).  Bright blue eyes were framed by a pixie hairdo, a button nose, a little bow of a mouth painted bright red. Along with the leather jacket, she wore pedal pushers, those ultra-tight forerunners of Capri pants.

Each day Angel Face would strut down the hill past my house, and I would spot her, like a birdwatcher, through the picture window. Some days she'd hold a transistor radio to her ear, and I could not resist her. I imagined that I could hear the music of The Elegants' "Little Star," or Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen," or the Royal Teens' "Short Shorts."

This reverie vanished with the sudden appearance of my mother, an Italian-Jewish woman named Shirley who, now at the age of 89, is still an expert at instilling guilt. On that day years ago, Shirley snuck up behind me and pierced the bubble of my fantasy with this crack:

"Huh. There goes old Angle Face."

"You mean Angel Face," I snapped.

"Take another look, Buddy Boy. That stupid little juvenile delinquent misspelled her name on her jacket."

And so it was. A-N-G-E-L Face was really A-N-G-L-E Face, and I could never look at her the same way again, even when she wore her red pedal pushers or the shortest of her shorts.

The deeper psychological issues of Oedipal angst and transference are left for another time. But since that day, more than 50 years ago, I've always triple-checked my spelling and preferred the company of those angels on the copy desk who have winged to my rescue, even when I was trying to play the angles.

You might be thinking, "If old Angle Face were a teen today, she'd have the advantage of a spell-checker on her word processor." But since angle and angel are both properly spelled words, a digital spell checker would not (and in my case did not) highlight a problem. It is true that my checker alerted me that I misspelled sabotage above. But it also alerted me of a mistake with ars, the antique version of arse or ass, and a Chaucerian pun making fun of pretentious expressions of art. Instead of ars, my spelling minions suggest that I use: airs, arts, arks, arcs, or arms. A squiggly red line alerts me that I have misspelled levitas, my made up Latin word for levity to balance the pull of gravitas. The minions prefer levities or Levites.

No reason exists to master spelling unless you can use it to make meaning as a reader and writer.  The magic will not work if you write allusion when you mean illusion, except to turn you, like Shakespeare's Bottom, into a fool wearing donkey ears, an ass and an ars. To avoid that fate, I suggest these specific strategies:

1. Rent the movie "Spellbound," or watch a televised national spelling bee. You'll be inspired by all those nerdy kids who have worked so hard to be smart. (In the third grade I won a school spelling bee by getting mirror, but lost the following year by stumbling on mention.)

2. The reason I could spell mirror in third grade is that I probably read and re-read the story of Snow White ("Mirror, mirror, on the wall ..."). Commit yourself to more reading and to noticing difficult words you bump into along the way.

3. Memorize a list of the most commonly misspelled words in pubic, I mean public, life. Here's a starter kit: accommodate, inoculate, threshold, pastime, definitely, camaraderie, hemorrhage, siege, seize. (I'll offer you a much longer list later this week.)

4. Use the dictionary, the one made out of paper not pixels. When I looked up sabotage, not only did I get the spelling, but also the derivation, the French word sabot, meaning shoes -- as in to bang noisy wooden shoes, disrupting attention to work. Knowing sabot, even seeing a picture of one in the American Heritage Dictionary, I will never misspell sabotage again.

Coming next: A long list of tough spelling words and advice on how to become their master.