Fourty irridescent rooves

What would you add to the ‘I’d spell it my way’ list?

I keep a list of words that I think would be happier spelt the way they are often misspelt (see screenshot, below), and I thought I’d share a few with you, friendly wordbirds, to see if you had some too.

A snippet from my spreadsheet, showing the top few rows of column F, titled ‘Typos and misspellings that absolutely should be spelt that way’, underneath: rooves (how roofs used to be spelt, anyway. Much better) | irridescent (‘correct’ is iridescent) | forty (for why is it forty?)

Until I added this list snippet to today’s post, I hadn’t noticed that it forms column F of my look-ups-and-lists spreadsheet. An appropriate ‘F for fail’? Uh uh. I say: F for ‘For when I rule the world’. The full list (tucked away in my files) will be released into the world/wild as soon as I get to create my version of the universe. At which point they’ll become a terrible rulebook in themselves and will all have to be scrapped anyway.

With autocorrecty AI, it’s more difficult to intentionally misspell a word now. And even if it doesn’t get autocorrected, it gets underlined (by spellcheck, Grammarly et al), adding a strange stress factor when I’m writing a post like this, or composing a poem, or editing an experimental text by an artist. The pull of the spellchecking plug-in is strong, it’s a special sort of effort to ignore it. Look at the red line under ‘autocorrecty’ above in this screenshot below.

This also shows how unhappy Grammarly is that I’ve written both ‘above’ and ‘below’ in the same sentence — it would prefer if I remove what it sees as a redundant instance of ‘above’. But I want to keep that in because I’m choosing the balancing rhythm and symmetry over (and above!) removing the risk of tautology.

By the way, none of this is a ‘look how bad AI is’ complaint; I’m mostly on board with it. As I say on my website¹, I’m an artisan and I’m friends with AI. I’m happy working with words in all ways, from paper and pencil through to a full suite of software, macros, and AI; I work with my clients to agree the approach that’s best for each particular project. I’ve made friends with AI partly because my clients were already using it to write first drafts. But weirdly, this year, I’ve also had more requests for copywriting than in previous years – which obviously doesn’t (yet) correlate with ‘AI is taking our jobs’, although I do know that it is causing pain for the industry in general so I am counting myself lucky. So, for the time being anyway, I’m happy to share the virtual space with AI where it’s helpful to people …

However, it has meant that my physical journal and pocket-sized writer’s notebook have become all the more precious to me, as has this ‘written by my brain’ Substack column. As have my thoughts about how I would break (or make) the rules of language.

So, a question to ponder as we go into the week: what words would you allow to be misspelt? What would you have in your column F?

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1. piprowson.co.uk