Spelling It Out

VP Dan Quayle tells student to add an "e" to potato in 1992

For the second time in a row, a segment on CBS Sunday Morning inspired me to chime in. This time they ran a story on two guys who go around correcting spelling and punctuation mistakes on signs. I remember a restaurant in Jewett City called "Classic's" that actually made the extra effort to add the unnecessary apostrophe. I assume it wasn't owned by someone named "Classic." A misplaced apostrophe drives me especially crazy. In this fast-paced world of texting and Facebook status updates because people have less patience to talk to one another, I see bad spelling and punctuation everywhere. "Its" vs. "it's" and "your" vs. "you're" and "there" vs. "they're" are my big pet peeves. I have to qualify my indignation by saying I'm not bragging about being a superior speller or punctuator, since there are plenty of things in life in which I will never excel. There have always been people who couldn't spell well, and there are legitimate reasons like dyslexia. I just wonder if our fast pace, failure to check our work or overdependence on the spell check feature mean our attention span has gotten impossibly short. Call me picky, but you have no idea how much I checked before hitting "publish" on this article!