Reader Friday: Glitches Happen
We all deal with typos, but there are some words where our fingers have minds of their own.
For me, I’m forever typing thing instead of think. And I’m constantly leaving out question marks.
Then, there are the words you can’t remember to spell—and even worse when you’re so far off the Spell Checker has no suggestions. For me, it’s bureaucrat and all its variations.
How about you? Recurring typos? Words you can’t spell? (Please don’t tell me you never have these glitches.)
Always and more often than I’ll admit in public…
My day-job is in healthcare architecture and facilities, and no, it’s not just medical terms, procedures, or space names – though anesthetist does give me the red-squiggled underling all too often…
I don’t know if it’s because I type ahead of my (alleged) thinking, but I’m nearly always slipping “g” into the wrong place – or even into words where it doesn’t exist:
– pring for print
– singage for signage
– desing for design
Then there ARE the non-spell-check-included medical words, terminology, and acronyms like NICU and LDR, – along with construction and interior “desing” jargon like soffit and HVAC and AIA,…
Of course, it doesn’t help that my spill-Czech has been corrupted with “y’all’re” and “wouldn’t’ve / couldn’t’ve / shouldn’t’ve…”
I’ve come to the unscientific conclusion that those “g” additions come from typing so many words ending in “ing” that the fingers automatically add the g instead of whatever the letter is supposed to be.
Truly, Terry, my fingers have a ming of their own.
My typing speed comes to a screaming halt, every time I have to spell the word, manoeuvre.
That one stops me, too, Nic. Thanks for sharing.
Tromp l’oeil leaves rubber streaks on my mental asphalt every time. Hors d’oeuvres, too.
Around our house, those are referred to as “horse’s ovaries.” Doesn’t help with the spelling. Canapes and Crudites (which are called Crud Ites.”
Mine would be “your” for “you’re” and it probably irritates me more than it would a prospective reader. Sometimes it’s so-called “spell check” and other times it’s the old problem of typing skills, or lack thereof. I then have to rely on my so-called proofing skills.
Thanks, Terry. Have a great weekend!
I dread having to rely on my proofing skills, Joe. What’s a weekend?
Two words that stop me every time: brocolli or is it broccoli? Diareah or diarreah or diarreha or…aw, sh*t.
I prefer to avoid giving my characters gastric disturbances to avoid spelling challenges. Thanks for sharing, Debbie.
I get to typing so fast that I often leave out the letter “g” and tend to mis-type the order of ‘ai’ in words.
When I get going too fast, my finger skip letters and insert some from the next word–their idea of a shortcut, I guess. Haven’t run into the ‘ai/ia’ issue–but now that you’ve called attention to it, I’m sure that’s going to be my next glitch.
Goood morning, Terry. Your maken us expose ourselfs, take off the cloak of editting. There’s one I always get wrong. I also recurrentently add extra syllables before ly endings. I definitetly need to wurk on that one. Sometimes the fingers just have a mind of there one.
Have a grate dey*
Sanctuary Mush, Steve.
I have a character in the current WIP whose last name is Thorpe. I type it wrong every. Single.time.
I add most of my character names to my Word dictionary, so at least I get the red squiggles when I mistype them. I have once character I gave an unusual/complex last name, and never used it, calling him by his nickname. Until I had to use it and had to go back to the first book he’d appeared in to find out how I’d spelled it. I’d mention it here, but I don’t remember how I spelled it.
I feel your pain. Back in ancient times before personal computers, I had to type my books from handwritten manuscripts with an IBM Selectric. The main character in my first three books was “Daniel.” I spent a small fortune on White Out correction fluid because I could not type the name correctly. Sooooo many vowels to switch around.
From. It comes out as form. Also, when on my iPhone for, comes out as fir. Frustrating.
I can’t type on my phone. I’ve always had trouble with ‘finger recognition.” I hated giving up my phone with the pull out qwerty keyboard.
Typing inside out is common with me, too, Ben. Thanks for stopping by.
I’ve trained Word to autocorrect the words that I frequently misspell. Gial and Gali automatically transform to Gail. I also train Word to capitalize the names of every character so I don’t have to remember to do it. Id becomes I’d and all contractions automatically add apostrophes–with a few exceptions like wont, which is a word I use more than I should. In the Victoria Emerson books, I got tired of writing the phrase, First Sergeant, so I trained Word to transform 1stsgt into what I need.
Teaching Word is helpful. One story – I was always mistyping “Shaeffer”, a spelling I used for one of my characters, so I taught Word to correct all my misspellings to come out Shaeffer.
Then, while I was working registration at a conference, creating name badges using Access, a registrant named Schafer reported her name was misspelled, and no matter what we tried, it came out Shaeffer. Little did I know that Office carried these ‘corrections’ across all of its programs. Once I went in and turned off my autocorrect settings, she had her name badge with her name spelled the way she spelled it.
Beware the auto correction or universal find and replace. I read a book about the true adventures of a spirit medium. “The Light” is where Earthbound spirits need to be sent to. The author realized she should capitalize “The Light” and did a universal find and replace. So, every time her character went into a darkened basement, she’d cut on “The Light.” I has such fun mentally playing with that constant error.
That looks like one of those time where even “find whole words only” and “match case” wouldn’t help.
Terry, how much time do you have? Call me the glitch generator, the typo conjurer, the man who sees words that aren’t there. Putting an closed quote at the end of a sentence of narrative rather than dialog is a speciality of mine, as is neglecting to do the same with dialog. Why put a return at end of a paragraph when you can add a space after the period first? All this and more 🙂
Thanks for the trip down the glitch memory lane, especially since my last set, from my recently published novella, is still fresh in my mind 🙂
Happy Friday!
Ah, I always forget to close my parentheses–but I never use them in novels, so I’m safe there. Em dashes are my friend. I always run a find/replace on those pesky spaces before paragraph returns. I find … a LOT.
Thanks for sharing, Dale.
Brain weirdness is real. Years ago, I accepted the fact that I will always question whether “occasion” is spelled with two C’s or two S’s. (I just typed the work into my search engine to verify the spelling.) Some words just won’t stay in my brain for God knows why. They are my glitches, and I accept them. Or I can never remember the name of the Shakespeare comedy about the mismatched pairs of lovers running around in The Forest of Arden even though I can still talk about the play with ease. (Another search engine check for “As You Like It.”) That’s probably the trauma from the play being on the giant test I had to pass to get my Master’s. And, yes, I passed.
Congrats on passing. At this stage of my life, I can’t put titles or authors to books. But I remember the stories.
I’m reviewing my editor’s corrections on the first draft of my WIP, so this is timely for me. I tend to type “every” for “ever.” “and” for “any.”
My fingers can’t type “more.” It always comes out “mroe.” Interesting side note: “More” is a Unix command. (e.g. “more filename” displays the next screens worth of file content.) In the stone tablet days of computers, it was so common for programmers to mistype the command that most (maybe all?) Unix operating systems interpreted “mroe” to be “more.” That may have been the first autocorrect.
Thanks for the history lesson, Kay. My former son-in-law was a big Unix user. Then again, he was a nuclear physicist, so all the programming and coding made sense to him.
Interesting. My husband’s field was high energy, elementary particle physics. (He can’t spell “more” either. 🙂 But he can go on for hours about the intermediate vector boson.)
My nemesis: Leiutenant for lieutenant.
And wouldn’t you know it…I have two in a current WIP…
?
Just call them LT. 🙂
?
I worked as a temp typist in my NY days and got very, very good. But doggone it, for some reason, when I’m really going, I will often type Thabks instead of Thanks. Can’t explain it, but there it is. It’s frubstrating.
Well, the B and the N keys are neighbors.
Thanks for stopping by.
I can never type “Joseph” without having to correct it from “Joshep.” But then, the backspace key has always been my favorite.
Whenever I shop for a keyboard, having an oversize backspace key is a must.
I’m mildly dyslexic on the dyscalculia side of the spectrum and I constantly transpose the numbers 2 and 7 as well as random letters. As a student at the U of Arkansas I learned that dyslexia could be triggered by a concussion. Like a damn fool I tried to ride a motorcycle up a ramp into a moving van. It didn’t end well.
Ouch! Sorry to hear that, Robert. If your mild dyslexia is the only aftereffect, you were lucky.
My common glitch is typing so fast that the first letter of the next word ends up as the last letter of the previous words. An example is “andt hen”.
Happens to me, too, Joe.