Words, Words, Words

Back in the day, when I was quite a young lad, and I would secure my satchel of books with a leather belt and wear my shoes around my neck while I walked to school so as not to wear out the soles, I was hooked on phonics.

I also had to walk uphill in the snow.

Honestly. Though it was only about a half-mile to school, and the snow would usually be melted for the return trip.

I was also hooked on phonics. Phonics is a pretty interesting reading comprehension concept that was adopted by my school, St. Olaf’s Elementary School in Bountiful, Utah. An interesting point about St. Olaf is that he was a martyred king of Norway who had once been a Viking of sorts. After his conversion, he employed the same Viking tactics on his people. That should give you an idea of the kind of school I went to.

But I digress.

Phonics, as anyone who has seen the funny shirts (Huked on fonix wurked for me), is using sounds and sound combinations to teach the high art of reading. Thus, if you could read the parenthetical above (if you didn’t skip it), you understand phonics. Most words follow a certain pattern of sounds and thus new words can be learned from simply “sounding it out.”

The unfortunate part of phonics is that is relies on, well, phonetic recognition. While this has the added impact of turning either-year-olds into stellar readers (I, and many of my friends were on a college reading level when we entered junior high, huh Jase!?!), it has the opposite effect on their spelling. Especially in a Latin based language forced like a square peg into the round hole of a Germanic format. Hence my spelling is rather . . . well, lacking.

No kidding, Rob? We always thought you were a FINE speller.

Nay, nay, my sarcastic friend.

I could live with being a poor speller if my job wasn’t as a professional writer. My friends, in their vehemence and fanatical frenzy to improve me in every way imaginable, find that my spelling, or lack thereof, to be one the banes of their existence.

In short, I am teased no end by my nearest and dearest.

Now, the stigma of being a bad speller, or even having poor penmanship (pen-personship for those who like political correctness in all things great and small), has been much removed by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (thank you gentlemen, you are free to go). Personal computers and word-processing software have not only leveled the playing field for we few, we happy phonetic few, but it has even placed us ahead of some. I remember looking with envy as papers were passed forward at St. Olaf’s. My frustrated attempts to make any letters legible at best were far overshadowed by the mostly female class. These haughty girls flaunted their abilities by not only spelling well, and crafting beautiful penmanship, but also by showing they had enough time to put little hearts or smiley faces above the “i”s.

With any luck they are making little hearts above “i”s while pumping gas.

Worse, now that my “work” has been made part of the World Wide Web, I have been made to suffer even more. Not the usual criticism that a writer, nay and artist misunderstood in his time (and a legend in his own mind) is made to suffer, but rather the exact opposite. My work is overlooked in favor of my lack of spelling (bonus points if you know how many spelling errors there are up to this point).

I receive emails and posts to my guest book that read like this: “Rob. You really need to run spell check or something. I mean gods man, I haven’t seen such poor spelling from a five-year-old. You need help . . . “

It generally goes downhill into profanity from there.

What wonderful friends, eh?

Well, boys and girls, this is my stand; my Alamo; my Falkirk, my Waterloo; my Khittomer (bonus points if you know the stardate of the last one). I raise up the standard of my people, who like me learned phonics a little too well. We are not animals to be mocked. We are not your little spelling-challenged playthings. We are people, damnit, and we deserve the same rights and privileges as our oppressors.

(This reads better if you hum The Star Spangled Banner while reading it.)

We shall stand together or we will die together. We will fight on the shores, we will fight in the streets, we will fight on the rooftops and at the Carl’s Jr.s, and we will never, never, never, never, never surrender.

Phonics spellers of the world: UNITE. Together our demands for equality shall be heard and granted.

Of course, I’ll settle for a date to the Harry Potter movie.