Spell Czech is Grate

Columnist Jonah Goldberg, who is carried in the National Review magazine, can best be described as a political and social commentator. He has the rare ability to make a point without being sour-faced, self-righteous, cranky, crusty, or shrill. That kind of gig is difficult.

Like anyone in such a gig, Goldberg has committed his share of typographical errors, known, in shorthand, as typos. Lively writing lends itself to such mistakes. Proofreading snappy text is a far less certain proposition than proofing a laundry list of passive verbs and flat, one-dimensional prose. It’s easier to polish a car that’s standing still than it is to polish one that’s moving. Such is the nature of written language.

So Goldberg, in a supreme act of journalistic housekeeping, ran a piece that Righted some Wrongs, so to speak, and he acknowledged (amongst other transgressions) his propensity to gore himself on homonyms.

Well, now that the issue has been raised in polite company, I’ll make the same admission. Sharp eyed readers catch me on numerous occasions where I’ve blurted “right” instead of “write,” or even “right” instead of “rite.”
And there’s “rolls” instead of “roles,” “they’re” vs. “there,” and a entire role-call (ha ha!) of similar goofs.

There is some minor redemption in technology, and I’ll be the first to admit: Spell Czech is grate! But it doesn’t snare homonyms. Nor does it catch you when you slip at the keyboard and say “by” instead of “my,” or “is” instead of “in,” “that” instead of “than,” and all that jazz. The difference between each pair of words I’ve just listed is one, thin letter.

All of these little language mines are nearly invisible to the human eye as it scans the landscape of text. The glaring errors, we usually catch. But the sneaky little camouflaged ones, they slip by us.

Well, that’s life. I’m a man of numbers as well as letters, and I know how mathematical errors in computations can snowball throughout entire projects. Careful, detailed, anal-retentive error checking is the order of the day. And I’ve invested so many years of my life doing that in quantitative venues that I’ve got scant interest in doing in when it comes to certain kinds of writing. I’m good at finding math errors but I’m a lousy text proof reader. It’s an innate part of my character. It bothers me not. I’ve made my peace with it.

I probably type faster than some people talk, and my fingers can outrun my brain most of the time. Fingers are great things but they get easily tangled in grammatical nuance when you’re pushing them to work at the speed limit. Hey, that’s the nature of the game when you’re pressing the envelope.

So maybe Mr. Goldberg is on to something with his blanket confession. Perhaps we should devote one day a year for this task, and then we start over with a clean slate. We could beg for forgiveness, and search for redemption from the Language Gods…Or, we can just acknowledge that our transgressions are the built-in by products of journalistic trail blazing, the broken twigs along the path, as it were. Yes, I like that better. Forget redemption. Eye c’est let’s knot worry two much about the twigs.