#97 Ooh ooh that spell

Today’s culture needs a stick up. "Laid back" rears its ugly head too often. Take email for instance. Somewhere along the way, I think it was when internet start-up companies and their brash slacker CEOs ruled the world, the internet and chatroom culture emerged with this ethos that said grammar and spelling were no longer important. Forget about capitalizing the first word of the sentence. But capitalize everything if you are shouting. Spelling? Who the hell cares, just get your idea across and throw in an emoticon. It became more important to arrange a colon and a parenthesis into a sideways happy face than make sure you weren’t "defiantly" agreeing with something rather than "definitely" agreeing with something. Paradoxically, at the same time a whole subset of word processing programs e-merged—get it, E-merged—that attempted to correct not only spelling, but grammar and diction issues in a document, like when I still get little green squiggly lines that when I click on them say the last sentence was too darn wordy. Imagine.
And para-paradoxically, spelling became even more important and the necessity for rendering a word exactly even more urgent when it came to typing a URL into your browser’s search box. The URL “Get the lead out dot com” better be spelled l-e-a-d or your surf to that exercise site might wash you up on the stairway to heaven.
Worse, legitimate spelling of company names led you to their website, but misspellings of the same names were often domains co-opted by the porno industry. How many marriages were broken up when the wife checked the family computer’s internet history and found a bunch of porno sites listed? “Hey honey, I’m just a bad speller.” He’s in for a bad spell indeed.
Maybe bad spelling just reflects our society’s proclivity for bad thinking. I just heard a public service announcement on the radio. Our local libraries are going to be closed on Sundays this summer. Now there’s a great idea. Wouldn’t want any kids to use their free time in a gol-durn library when they could be out badly spelling graffiti. Why would libraries be closed on Sunday? Staffing issues, I guess. I heard another announcement that kind of tied in. It was from the Department of Ecology. They were warning motorists not to hit the litter-picker-upper crews out on the freeways this summer. Turns out the crews are made up of “A” students that actually competed for the minimum wage positions. The spokesperson from Ecology was saying how it was their first priority that the kids be safe. I got an idea—you want ‘em safe, have ‘em work in the freaking library. How about putting the damn convicts on the road crews? Not to be cruel or anything but we can afford to lose a couple of them. “A” students are fairly rare. And not to stereotype or anything but, sometimes a little klutzy. I’d rather have them learning the duodecimal system than being a gooey-mess-victim on the side of the road. That’s just plain foolish with a capital PH.
America, ya gotta love it.