Steak or Stake

[expatgirl]

Unfortunately, your you're right, rite, write, Michael in FtW! Online dictionaries are also very helpful.

My mother thought that all meat had to be cooked well (not just pork)----and she did a great job of nuking steak to where it was a chewing experience. Loaded down with ketchup (perhaps we were seeking that "rare" look, it could be choked down.

 

[auntdot]

Michael is spot on. Spell checkers are great, but they are not a substitite for manual editing.

Have seen 'doe snot' fly through a spell checker to the chagrin of the writer who merely wanted to say 'does not'.

One of my favorites is 'pubic utilities'. I would love to speculate on that term but this is a polite cooking forum I believe.

Am sure many of you could come up with many other humerous examples.

I do love the checkers. They let me know that I am a deviant and not a devient. No that I object to the characterization, but I like it to be spelled correctly.

But the computer spellers ain't gonna help you out with 'there' vs 'their' or 'weather' vs 'whether' or 'too' vs 'two' vs 'to'. Heck the list goes on and on.

Love the English language and am very grateful to computers for the help they give me when I right (did this in Word and it did not even sniffle).

Maybe someday a program will be able to proof read a text, correct the spelling and the grandma (I love to do that to the spell checker) and not entirely destroy the creative character of the peace (OK, sorry, but I take a juvenile joy in lauding my humanity over my bit flipping spell checker).

I have a love hate relationship with my computer. It lets me buy things from eBay and order books from Amazon. I can read newspapers from all over the world. And books. The list goes on and on.

But every once in a while it wants to teach me that I am not the master, the boss, but merely a humored slave that is there to toss it bits and bytes.

And it becomes petulent (yes, I know it is spelled petulant but I told the speller bugger to mind its own business) and ignores whatever I tell it to do.

And then, as computer ignorant as I am, I have to unplug all the wires and take it to some smart guy who hires people who have not yet suffered their first zit to take the gizmo to task and fix it.

I give those young folks credit, they do not even snicker in my presents (I am still at war with the checker, sorry).

Sorry, I forgot what this thread was all about anyway.

And I dew tend to carry one (got it twice this time).

Anyway take care and God bless.

 

[shpj4]

Hello and welcome to DC. If you are talking about beef steak it is spelled this way.

 

[Claire]

When I first started writing a column for our local paper I was walking through the grocery store parking lot and this completely strange (as in I didn't know her, not that she was weird) woman walked up to me and said, "Write More! You are the best! You make my job so easy! You know what a spell check can and cannot do!" I got in my truck and came home and thought, who WAS that woman? I later learned that she was the proof-reader for the paper. She works nights, so a lot of people who work there never see her. I guess all those years of dreary secretarial work paid off somewhere.

 

[expatgirl]

I was a proofer for many years and it is a "cross-eyeing" job------so you must have been an exceptional speller, Claire!!

 

[Uncle Bob]

Testing One Two Three

 

[suzyQ3]

One of my most important and most difficult duties was teaching word usage problems to my court reporting students. Think about it: They take down what they hear, so it's up to them to figure out the correct form. We actually spent a whole module on the subject.

Telling them to use a dictionary just didn't cut it, because you have to know that you don't know something in order to know that you need to look it up. Know what I mean?

Just one of hundreds: If my students heard a speaker say, "That doesn't faze me in the least," many of them would transcribe the sentence as "That doesn't phase me" because they'd never seen the word "faze." They might have heard it, but they'd never seen it.

So the moral of the story is this: Read, read, and then read some more. That's the best antidote to such mistakes.

 

[Claire]

Even then at about the third or fourth time you're proofing something you start to see what is supposed to be there rather than what is actually there. I also used to type NATO documents, which meant I had to be able to type in British English rather than American English. I got so that I could automatically put the appropriate British spelling to words in the NATO documents, and American in the U.S. documents. I also worked for the scientific community for awhile and would type documents in languages I don't speak. Now proofing THAT is a challenge (it took three of us to do it, going letter by letter). But when it comes to word usage, the fact that I lived among many people for whom English is a second or third language gives entire new meanings. I'll never forget a Korean girl looking very strange when we talked about "breaking a record." She made the motion of breaking a record (as in music) over her knee. I laughed and explained what it meant and that it was idiomatic. She was a mail-order bride, didn't even know her husband, was 17 years old and scared to death. A little explanation, and a can of orange pop went a long way.

By the way, yes I am a good speller. Do not ask me why. Just like some people are good at math (not me!) or science (also not me). If you see a misspelling, chances are with me that it is really a typo. I have a friend with macular degeneration, and she calls often for spellings in French and English (not that I'm good at French, just that I have a decent dictionary!). I do have a few words that I have a mind block on. Like friend. Freind? Don't get me started!