Minuscule

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you every week by Linda Hill. Check out her blog for the rules and the contribution of other bloggers.

This week’s prompt:

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “a word you have to look up.” We all have words we can never spell. Use one of yours in your post and let that word drive your stream of consciousness where ever it goes. Have fun!

You know that old adage “use it or lose it”? Well, folks grammar and spelling falls into that category. When I was working my skills were a lot sharper – and perhaps my mind was, too. I find I misspell a lot more words now than I once did.

When I started as a ghost blogger, I worked writing for many different industries. A dress designer, an attorney, a short sale company, a private chef, a body builder, an adoption agency, a mental health professional, and several artists. The first rule I had to ‘unlearn’ was typing two spaces at the end of a sentence. It throws spacing and alignment on the website off. The second thing I had to learn was to also allow for some grammatical errors and some misspellings. “Think about how people type their questions into Google. Those weird and cumbersome phrases should appear in some of your work.” Yikes.

Small issues to some, but to me they were huge which brings me back to the actual question Linda posed. What word do I tend to misspell? MINUSCULE. It does not look spelled correctly to me. Maybe I am mispronouncing it. Wait – I will be right back.Nope. i pronounce it correctly according to Webster.

You see, the word comes from the Latin (sudden memories of my Latin teacher Mr. Boyland banging his head against the chalkboard) word minus which means ‘less”. Maybe that will help me remember how to spell it – it starts with the word minus!

I just want to plead my case a little more. Texting languages and predictive texting and auto-correct are destroying our society (Googling is, too, but that has more to do with research than spelling but researching spelling can be done with Google so YES – the destruction of society as we know it.

I wonder if it is true we use a very minuscule part of our bein power? I wonder if I might have been a rocket scientist if I could have harnessed that power. I suppose we will never know.