Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Am I Wronge?

I know how to properly spell the word "wrong".
Yet, when I was very young back in 1st grade learning to spell I was also watching a lot of PBS which had a few BBC shows. Some of the Brits had thick accents and when I heard the word "wrong" pronounced, I heard it as |ro ng| and not as |rô ng|. And I figured the English knew how to enunciate much better than us 'Mericans, so it stuck in my head as the proper pronuciation.

Then you add to this that my 1st grade teacher was trying to drill in the proper writing rules so when we were not sure we could refer to our rhythmic spelling points ['i before e, except after c' & all that whatnot]. By this time I was already really getting annoyed with all the American grammer exceptions that just flouted any rhyme I was getting brainwashed with.

No adult would ever attempt to explain why there were exceptions to the rules and they would just tell me, "That's just the way it's spelled. Look it up in a dictionary."

Yet like most young children, I was trying to figure out what the adults were up to and how to deal with them, so I'd retort, "If it doesn't follow the normal spelling rules and is unique, then how do you expect me to find it in the dictionary?"

The said adult would just look at me, and in their own way, dismiss me, my step-father was fond of threatening me with a spanking if I didn't stop asking him 'stupid' questions. Sometimes I was convinced all the adults were involved in some large conspiricy to screw with my head. These people that are supposed to be there to be my mentors and explain the world to me would never explain why the exceptions were the way they are {"Well, when creating the English language, words from the French, German, Dutch and others were borrowed and the spelling rules for the word in the native language were kept, my boy."}, mainly because they didn't know and did not want to admit ignorance to a child.
So, here I am with a phonetical error imprinted in my head {still do in fact} and set of knutty rules with too many exceptions, and I need to spell the word 'wrong'.

Now since I pronounced the word with a slight 'oh' sound, I figure there should be an e at the end. After many red marks on my returned spelling assignments that pointed to the contrary, I understood that spelling it w-r-o-n-g-e was incorrect.
However, this inforced another silly habit of mine to use symbols and ideas. Since it was wrong to spell 'wrong' with an 'e', and by it's very nature the word is to display the state of being incorrect & inaccurate, that it was a universal truth to spell 'wrong' wrongly. Which is also why I most often spell 'stupid' as s-t-o-o-p-u-d since if someone's stupid, then they'd spell it, well, wrong.

For this reason I always spell it 'wronge' on my first pass, and only catch it after I've written a few other words after it, or when I use the spell check. One time, I actually added to to the Word spelling dictionary by instinct when that spell check window opened. After a while and one too many people mentioned 'wrong' was wrong in my document {Which at first I would stare at them and wonder what they are talking about, since that's how it is spelled. Then I would remember after a bit that they were right. Doh!}, I went into the Auto-correct feature in Word and added in a rule to auto correct 'wronge' to 'wrong' while I type.

I think it should be accepted universally that spelling 'wrong' incorrectly is correct. So when it's written as, let's say, 'rongue' that would be totally okay since it is (just by example) wrong afterall.

Maybe it's just plain wronge of me to suggest such an idea.

No comments: