Talk:Spelling

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The article needs better organisation although I am at a loss as to how to better organise it. Capitalistroadster 19:40, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, how do the traditional encylopedias (World Book, Brittanica, etc) organize their "spelling" entries? Eep² 12:36, 29 May 2006 (UTC)'' Presumably the spelling mistakes in this article are for didactic purposes? Maybe the misspelt words should be italicized? Augusta2 19:16, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


Contents

[edit] National Geographic channel randomised intermediate letters.

National Geographic Channel has a filler item that shows that so long as the first and last letters of a word remain the same, the intermediate letters can be jumbled up and the meaning is still clear. On first impressions, this claim was supprisely true. However, what if there were some words that would be unintelligable if randomised. What if there were some words that change their meaning in a dangerous way if the letters are randomised. Since English has a million, the only way to avoid these spelling timebombs would be to know all the words and the problem pairs. Since that is a lot of work, it is safer just to use normal spelling and to avoid randomised letters.

The following phrase appeared in today's Australian Financial Review, not long after the NG piece.

  • Carpe diem - seize the day - do not waste an opportunity.
  • Crape diem - go the the beach, and waste an opportunity.
  • Carpe diem - szeie the dya - do nto wteas an otpnorpiuty.
  • Crape diem - sfutf teh day - go the the bcaeh, adn wtsae an otuorpunipy.
  • Buy!
  • Sell!
  • Buy! Sell! Cannot get more opposite than that.
  • Bury the Buy order!
  • Buy Order? Bury Order?
  • Buy or Sell? Cannot get more ambiguous/dangerous than that.

Tabletop 11:37, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] spelling unit1

1.fed 2.fell 3.beg

[edit] Sensational spelling merge

Obviously the divergent spelling section of this article and the sensational spelling article need to be worked on together. If the proposal is to delete sesational spelling and put it all here, I would suggest caution - this is an interesting enough phenomenon that it could be a good article in its own right. I would rather have a short summary here, with a "main article" reference, and put all the actual material in the other place. --Doric Loon 07:57, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

If you think that sensational spelling could make a good article on its own, then sure, I'll drop the merge request. Was mostly proposing it because it seemed like that it might be doomed to being a permanent stub, but if there's expansion possibilities, we might as well let it have them. SnowFire 03:23, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] technopropism

The article mentions "Misspellings ... not caught by simple computerized spell checkers". The article should say what these things are called.

This includes both homophone and also some not quite homophone word substitutions -- for example, I've seen college / collage; immolate / emulate, "wit hat" / "with at", none of which are homophones.

Is "technopropism" (Sandy Reed 1996[1]) ([2]) the best name for this? Or should we stick with malapropism [3]? --75.48.165.135 05:04, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] missing N's in "Pago Pago"

I have a hunch that the story of the missing typwriter "N" is just that, a good tale. Quite a few names in the South Pacific have missing or silent N's, for example, Nadi Fiji, pronounced "Nandi". The explanation for this that I have encountered, on several occasions (without my ever having seen it written down), is that the earliest printing press in the South Pacific, in the days of shipping by sailboat, did not have enough lower case N's, and had to limit usage of same. (And, of course, maybe this is another good tale.) Tim Ross 10:49, 12 October 2007 (UTC)


Well, I got a good laugh out of this too. There must have been a printing press/typewriter with missing 'm's in it going around too given the frequency of unwritten 'm's in e.g. Fijian names like Sitiveni Rabuka For what it is worth, his surname is pronounced Rambuka. And when Joe Rokocoko's surname was first printed someone must have been missing t and h! Neil Leslie (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 03:36, 30 November 2007 (UTC)