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Some years back, I was hired as a documentation writer by a friend who was a software developer. My friend—we’ll call him Hank—was an astute businessman, a creative and careful programmer, and an all-round fine fellow.
But he was a terrible speller.
One day I was checking a documentation detail on a piece of software we were developing and noticed that Hank had added some text to one of the screens. The new text included the word tommorrow, spelled with two m’s. I was aghast. But it was an easy fix to make, and he made it as soon as I pointed it out.
On another occasion he came into my cubicle to ask me how to spell hierarchy. He’d tried to type it in Microsoft Word, but he was so far off—highraky or something similar, as I recall—that Word’s spellchecker was totally flummoxed and unable to offer any of the usual helpful suggestions.
If some stranger had committed these heinous crimes, I’d have immediately mounted my grammatical high horse and hauled out my illiterate-bozo label. But this was not a stranger. This was Hank. And in my heart I knew that illiterate bozo would not be an accurate assessment. Hank was not illiterate. He was not uneducated. And he was certainly not stupid—he made lots of money writing clever little software utilities that lots of large companies bought.
I was born with the gene for word stuff. Hank was not. He could write brilliant computer programs but couldn’t spell what most people would consider to be the commonest of words. I, on the other hand, don’t know how to braise a roast or diaper a baby, but I know that Joyce Kilmer is not a she and George Eliot is, and I know how to pronounce Duquesne.
Guess which one of us is more likely to live long and prosper in today’s world?
It’s far too easy to judge another person’s capabilities against our own skill set. And that’s wrong. Everybody is born with different wiring, different gifts, a different capacity to learn, and it’s unkind, at the very least, for those of us who were born knowing how use words to sneer at those who weren’t.
Yes, in life you will be judged in large part by your use of the language. And yes, I do make those kinds of arrogant judgments about other people all the time.
But no, mastery of language is actually not a valid criterion for judging the fundamental worth of a person’s life, the depth of their character, or the value of their contribution to society.
In the business world, the linguistically challenged just need to be sure to surround themselves with minions who can spell. And in their private relationships, they need to find friends and companions who are a bit more open-minded, or at least more close-mouthed, about other people’s language failings than I am. One reader said of her husband, who often gets off course with his word choices, “Bless his heart, he has many fine qualities that offset his often comical confusion of words. I plan to keep him.”
I can only pray that my friends and family hold a similarly charitable view about me.
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