As long as I'm in
an
apologetic mode....
I am seriously
dyslexic. It gets worse when my chronic illness (with its
mental-faculties destroying effects) enters its chronic phase. (As it
has been most of this year.) I've noticed some of my comments are
getting spotty at best. Take this
one:
For all you know you were just a
pawn in some devious rift she was playing on her
boyfriend.
It's trite but true that there are plenty more fish in
the sea. Find one who's mouth waters at your dangling
worm.
|
Obviously that was
supposed to be "Find one whose mouth
waters at your dangling worm." *SIGH* (Not to
mention the previous paragraph was supposed to read "riff" not
"rift." Though I suppose that one still kinda worked.)
I hadn't
previously been spell checking my comments (articles, yes; comments,
no) , but I've started. I've even reinstituted the long unused
practice of having my computer read my writing back to me, so I can
catch even more mistakes.
The thing about
dyslexia is, you don't read things as they are. Somewhere between the
input and your perception the signal gets altered. I could read my
work 50 times and never catch the mistake because I don't see what
is there. I see what is supposed to be there. My brain
changes it to read as it's meant to. The errors go right by me.
The results can be
truly embarrassing. One article on my
website was up for months before I happened to notice it was such
an incomprehensible mess that even I wasn't sure how it was
supposed to read. Apparently the intervening months had been enough
to erase the "should be" from my mind and allow the "is" through.
(I think that's
one of the things that bothers me about "language cops" on forums --
the kind of guys who don't have an argument so they start nit picking
over grammar. You never know when someone is dyslexic or something
similar. They may have a Masters in English and still miss things. As
far as I'm concerned the purpose of language is to communicate. If
the language used -- no matter how poor -- communicated well enough
that you know how to correct it then it was good enough to serve its
purpose. Nobody's perfect, guys! Even published books, read by
multiple editors and proofreaders, get released with sometimes
shockingly obvious mistakes. I'd blame dyslexic typesetters, but
multiple people are supposed to be reading the galley proofs too.
That's why galleys exist!)
Anyway, I'm
apologizing for the increase in grammatical errors in my comments
(and the couple that slipped through in my articles; I hope I've
caught them all).