For those of us who are say older than a half century.. I guess we all can remember spelling bees in class and with our year, grammar rules and composition class. English being one of the most important part of the Readin, Ritin and Rithmatic courses...
and we all pretty well know what a Funk and Wagnall's or Oxford Unabridged or even Noah Webster's Unabridged Dictionary is/was.
Bill E Bob wrote:George Willer wrote:I keep a hard copy of a dictionary on a shelf, just an arm's length away. It never fails me.
Now THAT'S what I'm talkin' about!!!
Some of us even got to be up close and personal with our dictionaries. Depending on what kind of mouth you might have had.. you might end up learning a few hundred pages of the above dictionaries. Now,if you had one like me.. you got to write it all out more than once
I find that I still have a pretty good vocabulary and my spelling is pretty good. There are only a few words that give me grief.. and I have to resort sometimes to a spell check if I am in doubt. It is unfortunate that today nowhere near the emphasis is put on proper grammar, structure, punctuation, spelling and composition. Today what ever is easiest is the rule.. that is why I guess we have sentences such as "My Bad" or "What, You axed me sumthin?" just to name two of my biggest pet peeves of late.
Spell check is a good alternative to the printed word, but again, it is only as good as the operator using it..... spell check can do spelling, but does not understand grammar, context or tone/flavour.
Oh well......