Talking about spelling.  There is nothing quite like seeing a badly spelled word to get under your skin - well mine to be precise (all simple mistakes and judgments in error aside of course).  But mostly it’s the use of misspelled words adopted by a nation who, after a disastrous tea party, decided the only true way to distance themselves from the motherland was to create their own way of spelling the very same words that the motherland used. 

 I am of course talking about the Queen’s English being amended (bastardized) ever so slightly (and wrongly dammit) to produce the Presidents’ English.

 So, in an effort to keep us all happy – please use Zeds rather than Zees, more S’s than Z’s (go on empathise with me), two M’s (let’s get with the programme), U’s wherever possible (to colour my world) and no U in place of O (thanks Mum).  PLEAZE !

“An inventive and experienced commercial team that where in previous years behind the former financial success of X, have since been reciprocated to endeavour these fundraisers to ensure maximised revenue for Y”.

The above appeared yesterday in a publication with which I am intimately acquainted. I’m still trying to figure out what it means and I won’t even start on the misspelling of the word “were”. It’s like those appalling translations that you frequently read in cheap appliance instruction manuals, where the translator clearly has absolutely no grasp of the target language. I’m just embarrassed for the writer. I’ll hazard a guess that he either picked phrases out of some other commercial document that sounded good, without actually knowing exactly what they meant, or that he wrote a roughly-worded piece and then looked up alternative words in Thesaurus and chucked them in to try and make it all sound more highbrow, except of course he didn’t fully understand what context to use them in. The only bit he got right was “inventive”. Priority for this week…..get an editor or get a new job!

I have reacquainted myself with using a dictionary this week! In the first instance it was as a result of spellcheck failure (my excuse) and the other instance was to find out that a word which I use in my head was not a real word at all! So, you may gather the written word is not my  forte, I am a reflective, listener type.  I am going to enjoy the challenge of this blog site but short and sweet will be my approach, if you had not noticed already.

Anyhow, I digress, back to serendipitious synchronization. Whilst literacy is very important, we are all human and mistakes happen even with spellcheck. But what if you could not read or write? Two mums told me this week about the reality of having children with ‘borderline’ dyslexia. I never realised. I always felt that people with dyslexia just learnt to read a different way than the rest of us. But that is not the case. A child even with borderline dyslexia may skip lines in the text and continously miss words they do not know. Can you imagine?? To be honest , I can’t! It’s difficult to comprehend but I can feel the struggle for all involved, the worry for parents and the frustration for the children/ dyslexia sufferer to say the least.

So, hearing that story during my bad spelling week, was not serendipity (a faculty of making happy discoveries by accident) nor was it synchronous ( go at the same rate as) but it was my word ‘synchronisity ‘.

Synchronisity in MY mental dictionary means something happens that puts the first thing that happened in perspective and strangely came at just the right time. I was upset because someone corrected my spelling in a very patronising way but now I realise what it might mean to not be able to read or write easily and that it is not something that everyone can take for granted let alone be haughty about!

So, lastly, I apologise in advance for any spelling or grammatical sloppiness on my part,  I will do my best not to be sloppy but mistakes do happen, even to the best of us.

Chair Mum

Apparently I am a bit weird. The graphic designer that I have working on a prospectus told me that mine was the last e-mail that he received at 2 a.m. and the first that he received at 8 a.m. Did I sleep, he wondered, ever? I told him that I had been up finishing off my beef stew (oh, yeah, I’ve abandoned the French. Yes, I’ve been slagged enough today). I told him that if it could be sent via e-mail, it would be on his desk by now. He deserves it.

You see, in the last little while, I’ve been making a lot of mistakes. I don’t make mistakes very often or at least I didn’t up until I left my job over a year ago. Somehow the routine of work kept me on the straight and narrow and the fact that little mistakes could cost thousands focussed me on the job at hand. But this football thing has my head very messed up. And these mistakes keep being noticed by other people before I notice them. I don’t like that one little bit. If I f*** up, I like to find out before anyone else does so I can fix it before anyone else grimaces disapprovingly in my direction.

I was in particularly foul form a few days ago after having several mistakes pointed out to me and really not in the humour for two of my children to behave as though I was a piece of furniture rather than their mother. I lost it, spectacularly, and said I was off. The older one continued de-stalking strawberries for her smootie and the younger shrugged her shoulders. As I stormed from the room, the older one directed the following utterance at the food processor “don’t you think you’re a bit old for that kind of behaviour”.

Am I? Does one ever grow out of throwing a strop that a gay fashion designer would be proud of? Or am I really as self-obsessed as one of my good friends keeps reminding me I am? The friend, aka anyone else, of the mistake-pointing-out. The same one I delivered a little package of beef stew to earlier today, apologising that the potatoes were floury when they should be waxy.

I had the table set for dinner before I went round to my friend and I admit to feeling very virtuous as I told everyone to take their seats at the abnormally early time of 6 p.m. (we eat late in this house, a consequence of my anti-social football schedule) opened the oven door, celebrity chef-style, and proudly carried my creation to the table. My youngest doesn’t mince her words. “I hate it” she pronounced. The other two were more vocal. So, having been marched upstairs to spend the evening in their bedrooms without dinner, eldest has since returned to the kitchen to apologise for not giving my dinner a chance. Too late of course. It’s been devoured by myself and their father. And so she busies herself making macaroni cheese (her favourite). Note to self – do not eat all the dinner when the kids say they hate it. They’ll be back.

And so I send e-mails in the wee hours and first thing in the morning because I’m determined to make a better fist of it and to be on top of things and because all I really want is approval. After all, an idle wife doesn’t really want to be reminded that maybe that’s all she should be. Am I being a little hard on myself? Maybe, just maybe, 5 hours sleep isn’t enough anymore and maybe, just maybe, those floury potatoes won’t be so offensive because the beef is so good.