Recieve
Seperate
Cronicled
gaurd
Vaccum
percieved
Occassionaly
So what connects these words or what is common thread here ?
No, its not a big mystery or anything major. All of these are typed wrongly by me during last one week in various conversations / emails. I have been noticing this for a while now, I realize I cannot spell certain words correctly at all. I of course turn to auto spell check which puts read squiggles under the word and if I right click on it, will prompt me with right spelling which I accept. After I while I think I have been conditioned to putting out likeness of words and expecting the machine to keep me straight. Pretty low effort you see for the man.
I do type lot of emails and do lot of chat / group chat conversations at work and occasionally create multi-page documents. So its not like I don't use these words and its not just me, I have noticed the same happening with several colleagues of various ages and ethnicity. Its just that spelling it exactly right is no longer essential as long as you get it somewhat right the software will do it for you. In fact iphone text message and whatsapp messenger both have smart type option where the word is provided as soon as you start typing and sometimes it guesses based on the context, so you don't even need to start typing the word. The word just appears for you to use. That sort of thing plus most common places where type like emails or other chat software have auto-correct which anyways helps you spell easily without a hassle so much so that our natural processing power has receded.
Not sure about the kids these days, but I wrote almost all my exams save my MBA ones in physical paper so spelling had to be right. But more than 15 years of relying on spell check has ruined my spelling sense. I do wonder if kids of these days or in the next decade will continue using paper and pen / pencil to write stuff and do things like spelling matter that much for them? I know Spelling Bee contest used to be really huge in US and lot of Indian kids used to win it and make news back in India. Just a couple of months back multiple kids shared the honors as the competition ran out of words to test the remaining contestants. I was struck by how incredible it was that some of these kids are so advanced in spelling ability to beat the dictionary while personally I was struggling to spell some common words. That's quite something ...
Having said that, I also wonder if it really matters. What is the point in spelling bee and trying to get it right when all you do is type electronically with spelling assist always at your side. Going forward maybe we will just have tell your personal AI assist ( Siri / Alexa and likes) and voice to text typing will happen. Who knows really, but maybe not. Most likely we will manually type things and perhaps write physical letters which may in fact become super cool again. As for me, I know I'm just being lazy and I really can spell those words if I put effort and my mind into it but I really don't need to. Perhaps that's the point. However that also brings up the thought that today my spelling is off by 1 missing letter or two letters jumbled in wrong order. If we stop caring about such mistakes maybe it
become so bad that you will next make bigger mistakes like getting 2-3 letters off. Then after a point even spell check cannot help as you no longer start making sense!
