A Word or Two About Spilling
When I was a little fellow it became obvious to me early on that I lacked something the other kids had. I ran home on the first day of the realization and I said to my mother,
“Mother, it has become obvious to me that I lack something the other seven-year-old children in my educational establishment have in abundance.”
She said, “Why’re you talking like a wally?”
I replied, “Mother, I am not speaking like this in real time, this is merely a recollection of the conversation that I shall have when I am 57 and living in a little fishing village on the Gulf of Siam.”
“Oh, well then that’s all right, I suppose,” she said. “But I’m not happy about you growing up and being a toff. Don’t forget your roots, boy. And, by the way, what is it that you’re lacking?”
“Mother, all the other little tykes in my class seem to have no problem with spilling.”
“You can’t spill?”
“Ni.”
“Shouldn’t be that hard,” she said. “You always used to be able to. You got enough stains on your bibs when I was trying to force the chopped liver, semolina and minced carrot baby food down you.”
“No, mother,” I chagrined. “You have fallen into the trap that many will when receiving correspondences from me over the years. You have assumed that I’m talking about ‘spilling’ – the causation or allowance of a substance to run or fall out of a container, the scatterance from containment, shedding, or the causation of wind to be lost from a sail, whereas I am referring to ‘spilling’ – the incorrect putting downance of the word which means to name or write in order the letters constituting (a word or part of a word).
“Oh,” she said. “So, we aren’t really having this conversation.”
“No, but nobody will know that. I’ll use it in a blog or something when I’m trying to explain that it’s cruel to make fun of people that kan’t spill. I’ll tell them that spilling has always been a problem for me as I lack that ‘spilling gene’ that gives others the power to visualize the spilling of words. I shall explane in great detail that many of us cannot ‘see’ the words in our mind’s eye. I shall…
“What’s a blog?”
“It hasn’t been invented yet. It’s sort of journal entry that, potentially, everyone in the world has aksess to.”
“So, you can’t spell?”
“That’s what I’m traing to say, motha.”
“I don’t want you telling nobody that. They’ll think I didn’t educate you right.”
“Fir not, mater. Spilling has nothing to do with intelignence. George Washington couldn’t spill. Agatha Christi and Hans Christian Anderson had dislaxia. Ablert Einstein couldn’t remember the months of the year. I shall go on to be a teecher. (can you believe I spent five minits there fighting with my spill checker to spill teecher rong?)I shall werk with childrun who think they’re dum because they carn’t spill and I shall let them no they are normel like me. I shall edukate young people in yooniversities, I shall go on to rite great books that will win prizzes, and all this with the inabilitude to spill. I shall make you prowd of me, mater.”
“Well that’s all right, then.”
October 5th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
In my opinion a big problem nowadays for authors in relation to spilling is the arrival of the spill chucker in modern worm processors (modern being a relative term, as the Amstrad PCW 8256 is approaching its twenty-fifth anniversary – eek!), which appears to have lulled editors into believing that it is no longer necessary to have a proof-reader go through a manuscript with a fine tooth comb (what /is/ a tooth comb, anyway?) looking for egregious spilling and grammatical mistales.
While an increasing number of academics tell us that correct spilling is unimportant as long as the meaning is clear, and that TXT SPK IS GR8 IF IT GTS THE MSG A X, an increasing number of people whose job it is to mediate the flow of thoughts and ideas from word-smiths such as yourself to consumers such as myself are themselves seemingly incapable of spotting a spilling mistale. I think this is a Bad Thing.
I act as an unofficial sort-of-editor for an author. Between that author finishing a work and that work being submitted to the real editor, I sit down in front of the worm processor with a proper dictionary (and an Internet connection) and do my best to find mistales. I look automatically for “its” versus “it’s” mistales; “their”, “there” and “they’re”; “whether” and “wether” (a castrated male goat, apparently); “1970s’” versus “1970′s” and “1970s”; all kinds of easily-made mistales that will be missed by a spill chucker (but might be caught by a spilling-and-grammer chucker if it were any good, which they generally aren’t), and will only properly be caught by a literate and conscientious proof-reader.
I don’t catch all such mistales, because I am not a proof-reader by profession. I can’t read each work from start to finish looking for every mistale “by hand” (for a number of reasons, including a general indifference to the genre in which my author friend works). Therefore what I tend to miss are systematic mistales where one word is mis-spilled, but the mis-spilling is itself a correctly-spilled word, just the wrong one in context. That’s a shame, because modern proof-readers aren’t catching those either, and modern typesetters and compositors are introducing more mistales themselves. The end result is that my friend’s latest book had two mistales on one page – one that I missed in the original manuscript, one that was introduced at the typesetting stage. How embarrassing!
I fully accept that not everyone can spill correctly. I am always happy to proof-read things for my colleagues at work, and am unofficial proof-reader for our company magazine (where I operate under the nom de plume Captain Nitpick (with my trusty sidekick, The Quibbler)). What I’m taking this opportunity to rant about is the increasing shift (not necessarily by yourself, Colin, not even by implication) from “I cannot spill, but I know that my spilling mistales will be caught by the many people whose job it is to do so” to “I cannot spill, and that doesn’t matter”. It /does/ matter. Publishing used to be an industry that cared about quality (in the sense that even “Confessions of a Window Cleaner” was published free from spilling mistales). Now it cares little for the quality of the original work, pouring all its efforts into promoting Slebs regardless of talent, and little for the quality of the process whereby that work is presented to the public. Oh, calamity!