Spellchecking Bad Boy
Tommy looked at us, seven sets of eyes, watching, and he reached for his spoon. “There you go,” my father said. “Attaboy. Eat up.” — from David Sedaris, Attaboy, Lets Explore Diabetes With Owls
My dear readers. “Maybe I should apologize for the many spelling mistakes I’ve made in my last post?” Me keeps thinking. Recently I’ve turned off spellchecking in my text editor and was honestly thinking that I will not make spelling mistakes if I only focused hard enough. And it was only after I’ve emailed the post, that I thought, “a quick look can’t hurt” and put the post through AI; which found like 10 spelling mistakes at once and a few structural omissions. However, none of you complained.
What I did receive though, was a humorous Whatsapp message from my mom today (who does read my blog as well) showing the freshly cleaned hems of her cream-coloured wide-legged trousers, which she soiled on her bicycle ride just yesterday.
Therefore, besides the spelling mistakes nobody complained about, my post did seem to have an impact beyond my wildest expectations. Originally, I wrote “Did my mom scold me too much?” Quite unexpectedly, in a light hearted way, my mom and I both ended up healing a shared childhood bruising.
Btw, as you know, I’m keeping the “comment” and “like” features under my posts switched off, but I do like to receive occasional feedback, per email for example — as I’m not easily available via postal services. Sending penmanship-style letters in envelopes for private conversations, that ship has definitely sailed.
Ok, the bottom-line is I’ve completed spellchecking my “Bad Boy, sit!” blog post. You will find the updated post on my homepage and on Substack. Furthermore, I’ve added a sentence that it was the dog Oreo, who barked at me, so we can finally make sense of the post’s title (even though I didn’t call him anything, instead I sympathized with him for just having spent 2 weeks in an animal shelter while his mom was in Bangkok for a beauty procedure.) I made a few more improvements to the post, like for example, changing “five minutes” to “two minutes” in the toddler story, since it might have been closer to two minutes for real, and either way, it makes the story tighter, more humorous, AI confirmed (as if it ever dealt with a toddler.)
Ok, and now I’ll go ahead and switch the “Check spelling while typing”-feature of my text editor back to “on” again, but will keep any word-completion and AI features turned “off”.
On the upside of my faux pas, I have noticed that posting with spelling mistakes seems to be a thing now, trending. Perhaps because it makes AI postings look more like they were carefully handwritten, instead of mass produced in a data center? *shrug* So, in this light, in hindsight, instead of criticizing myself for having been careless, I can now tell myself that my 10 spelling mistakes were “up topaz.“