Ripples on the brain

A couple of years ago, I used to routinely attend Lecture sessions on Carnatic music. Musicians and musicologists, while explaining the raaga concept, used to demonstrate the right and wrong ways of singing a raaga. After attempting to sing the raaga the wrong way (for e.g. just touching the swara notes and not bringing out the raaga bhavam or not singing the traditional swara phrases a raaga is famous for), they would claim (sometimes genuinely) that it was difficult for them to sing them in the wrong way even if they tried. The crowd will then laugh and applaud.

I was reminded of those incidents when I read this article of Hasan Suroor in the Hindu today. Writing about an article of a British academic (which is the second piece in that link) where he wants pundits to agree on a set of variant spellings, Hasan Suroor provides some examples which are funny:

if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Ken Smith of Buckinghamshire New University wants pundits to agree on a set of “variant spellings” of some of the more commonly misspelt words such as “their” for “their,” “argument” for “argument,” “twelth” for “twelfth,”, “truly” for truly and — horror of horrors — “speech” for speech!

I read and re-read this sentence umpteen times, but couldn’t differentiate between the wrong spellings and correct spellings for all the example words, except “twelfth”. Is it the case of Hasan Suroor or the British academic unable to spell the words the wrong way even if they tried to like our musicologists in the first example?

I think the reason for the wrong wrong spellings is because the reporter typed his article in MS Word or some such editor that automatically corrected his wrong spellings without alerting him. Or some editor diligently ran the article through a spell check utility and corrected his wrong spellings . That reminds me (again) of a proposal we did for the US retail chain Lowe’s. MS Powerpoint automatically “corrected” all Lowe’s into Lower without alerting the author. Normally spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are not very uncommon in these presentations, but this was one in which we even got the client name wrong! Thanks to Microsoft products’ assumption that they are smarter than the user.

Coming to think of it, MS editors may be a major culprit for people fogetting (or not learning) their spellings. They don’t even allow them to realize they are entering the wrong spelling.