Shoe by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly for March 14, 2021

Thanks, Gramma…..

Not just kids can’t spell.

The dreaded wiggly red underline and the [Control (or Left)] click does not suggest anything like what one is trying to say.

If she’s not there physically, she’s still there “in your head”.

I remember seeing some of Sir Winston Churchill’s letters to his wife. For man who was a very famous author on the English Language is spelling was atrocious.

I’ll never forget Miss Trigg, my fifth grade teacher, saying "We want A’s in Grammar, not E’s.

“It is indeed a dull man who can think of but one way to spell a word.” Ben Jonson 1572-1637

Never had any trouble with letters/spelling. . .math/numbers, however. . .never made it past algebra 1 even though it had letters in it. . .

On a slightly different note, on a recent visit to a local museum we were enthralled by the beautiful handwriting in a display of children’s school notebooks from the late 1800’s. We were definitely not enthralled to read an explanatory card that mentioned “in the future no one will be able to read these books because cursive handwriting will no longer be taught”. My granddaughter told me a story concerning a young girl in her office who had to sign some documents and literally did not know how to write her signature in cursive. My granddaughter had to spend an hour teaching her how to write her own name!

From Mad Magazine- Pall Mall can’t spall.

But Mrs. Twitchell clearly didn’t teach Cosmo to straighten his desk.

One man’s boon is another man’s curse. Generally, I love the convenience of Spell-Checker and Grammarly when writing … but … I often use dialogue and dialect and this drives both those writing aides completely nuts and I often wind up with paragraphs filled with red and/or squiggly underlines.

When I misspoke in class once, my teacher said “Where’s your grammar?”. I replied “At home with my grampa”.

So Mrs,Twitchell, what, like 150 ? Now that’s dedication.

Gary and Susie should have given Mrs. Twitchell a “Spelling Police” uniform.

The inability to spell doesn’t bother me as much as the inability to reason.

Traditional Shorthand looks kind of like a bunch of squiggles. For an example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand . My father used it in WWII.

I’d swear to it that the person who wrote the code for my phone’s autocorrect learned to spell phonetically.

A priest, a minister and a rabbit walk into a bar. The bartender asks, why are you here. The rabbit says, I don’t know about the others, but I am here because of spellcheck.

Oooh, I dare you to call her a Nazi!

My computer corrects my spelling and grammar. I don’t know who does it for the guy who played Doctor Frasier Crane.

If you’ve ever had a Mrs, Twitchell in your life, consider yourself fortunate, indeed.