Denseman on the Rattis

Formerly known as the Widmann Blog

enlinguistics

Can I spell or can't I?

In some ways, I’m pretty good at spelling. I rarely look up words, and words that I write are normally written correctly, so I normally disable spelling correction – there’s no point.

However, I sometimes write words that aren’t what I intended. Today, for instance, I wrote bath instead of bad, and I recently wrote at instead of and. Always correctly spelt words, just not the right ones, although they’re similar.

I believe I do it occasionally when I speak, too, although I don’t remember any examples.

What is this phenomenon called? Not dyslexia, I think. Does it have a name? Do other people do it, too?

0 thoughts on “Can I spell or can't I?

  • you work in dictionaries! shouldn’t you keep this problem quiet? 😉

    Reply
  • Should I? After all, I can spell the words, I just use the wrong ones! 😉

    Reply
  • Sebastian

    If you don’t make the word-meaning part of the dictionaries, you don’t need to care ;_)
    Anyhow, bath instead of bad, I would call it a Freudian slip, with the other one, a kind of afasi, but that was a cheap one, since it just means a language fault. Hopes you two gets MY strange spelling in English ,-)

    Reply
  • You’re right – could it be mild aphasia? Anyway, today I made another one: I wrote “half work” instead of “hard work”.

    Reply
  • And another one (in Danish): I wrote ‘netop’ instead of ‘næppe’.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *