Words...

The story starts out that when I was a young lad (not quite as far back as the dinosaur time...) if it had not been for the Montgomery Wards and Sears & Roebucks catalogs (which I perused endlessly and not for the girl underwear photos... well ok ... not for them at the time of my life...) I might not have learned how to read.

Even with my father being a journalist and a college level English instructor I still had not totally grasped the passion I have now for words...

My punctuation may be erratic, and my sentence structure may take a life all its own. However this is my own style of writing ( similar to my original style of typing using the Columbus System - Discover it and land on it...) that tends to flow more like my mind does... until I get the chell-specker involved...

So to get back on topic.... Words...

When I was engrossed in those catalogs a word kept popping out at me AUTOMATIC... there were AUTOMATIC Washers, AUTOMATIC Toasters etc... (oh yes: etc... is correct and is short for etcetera NOT EKCETERA as some people have a tendency to corrupt it... continuing on ) while being a young lad in the 50's and 60's it was the ATOMIC era... so I was doing my best to read the word AUTOMATIC as ATOMIC... my mind wanted it to be ATOMIC Washers, ATOMIC Toasters etc... but it just would not want to sound out correctly like that way too many letters...

Words would continue to pile up that had interesting meanings and those that were spelled the same that meant different things WIND, READ to name a couple... and of course those that can be spelled differently but pronounced the same TO, TOO, TWO, TU, II,  and 2.

Of course we must touch upon those that are just plain corrupted by many... JEWLERY for JEWELRY, AKS for ASK, NUKULER for NUCLEAR (which in itself has the word CLEAR in it)some are made light of by knowing people on purpose while others are just plain old either not caring due to how they learned it and not wanting to learn it correctly... as in ATOMIC / AUTOMATIC.

One comes to mind this morning CALVARY and CAVALRY. Calvary - where Jesus was crucified and Cavalry (looking back I noticed that I had myself written Calvary here instead of Cavalry) - Horse Soldiers as in 'Here comes the Cavalry' (Now knowing the difference can you imagine for a moment 'Here comes the Calvary' ?)

One of my daughters when learning to read was sounding out words as she read them and began to snicker. She informed me that I was the stinky one - not for what you might be thinking... but because my formal first name as THEODORE she sounded out and read as THE ODOR e... therefore The Odor has now become one of my nicknames (not well known maybe until now). I am glad that was NOT discovered while I was young. imagine the humiliation that could have been encountered...

You the readers (followers and all) may at times find your own words that keep you elated and or enlightened and with that I leave you this time with a snippet from my grandfather (and after it one that one of my daughters found and passed on to me... with a simple one from my mother in between)

My grandfather brought to my attention a different way to spell FISH as in GHOTI...
The GH was derived from tough, the O from the word women and the TI from the word action thereby when combined spell GHOTI or FISH...

My mothers simple one was using the letters MT on a box signifying that it was EMPTY...

And last, but of course not least, from Randi we have: ghoughpteighbteau or more commonly spelled Potato... look it up.... I can pretty much assure you it is not in the Montgomery Wards or Sears & Roebucks catalogs...