Where is the journalism here? Where is the story? I don't see any. "People can't spell" isn't a story...
The Gyllenhaal Experiment
111–120 of 125 posts
Re: The Gyllenhaal Experiment
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
7 years french => I keep screwing up "Peugeot" (cars)
Including Renault we now have 2 weird ways to spell the O sound in French (eau, eo) and 1 weird silent pair of consonants (lt).
It's not "eo" that gives you the "o" sound, it's just the "o". The "e" is here to prevent the "g" from being pronounced hard, as in "green".
Re: The Gyllenhaal Experiment
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you spell bureau? Maybe you can make a mnemonic, how are you with spelling burette? A crazy person is using a burette with a gold (Au) end, extruding a 3D wireframe model of a desk (bureau): Bure(tte)+au+crazy ... and hopefully you can remember where the final "c" goes.
I cannot spell bureau. It trips me up even typing it. Maybe this is the thread that will have finally jammed it into my brain. I'll get back to you in a week or so. :-)
The "eau" is common in words derived or taken directly from the French (e.g. "beautiful")...
Re: The Gyllenhaal Experiment
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can never spell "bureaucracy" correctly without assistance. I always have to spell check it. Sometimes I can't even get close enough to spell check. I can't think of any other English words I have such trouble with.
The other day I got some funny looks when I yelled ‘exercise’ at my phone in a locker room because I couldn’t remember how to spell it.
I always go through "exersize", no, wait, "exercize", no, wait, "exercise."
I always get there, but it always takes me there tries.
Re: The Gyllenhaal Experiment
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I generally veered off path around half-way on most of them. That's something misleading about this visualisation... It makes it look like you got it more wrong because you have a letter wrong early in the word, even if every letter after it is right.
Agreed, I would have loved to see it more like a detour along the correct spelling. Almost like a character based diff.
Personally I loved seeing the veering path for M. Night Shyamalan: https://imgur.com/a/Es5Q0nQ. Everybody said "There's a Y here somewhere," and veered off at a different point.
But a detour-based viz would have also looked cool: just a bunch of Y's stacked above the name, each one a different attempted insertion point.
Re: The Gyllenhaal Experiment
#116Names are probably the least-interesting thing to study with respect to spelling, because they are completely arbitrary and there is so much variation even in identical-sounding names.
How many variants can you find for "Mikayla"?
Re: The Gyllenhaal Experiment
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that people with the same name spell it differently, so we're just trying to recall arbitrary [often phonetic] misspellings accrued -- often by illiterate people -- over generations. If your family immigrated somewhere there's a good chance the immigration official gave you your current family name spelling. For me, my surname has about a dozen variations that arise, it seems, from mediaeval British sp…
For me, it's: "L-A-I-N-G. Laing." (looking once over vaguely yellow skin) "alright, Mr. Liang." The two spellings come from entirely different cultures! Same with "Lee" (as in Robert E. and Bruce).
Know someone that was once excited to learn about the famous Chinese general that contributed to the American Civil War on hearing about General Lee for the first time, only to be quickly disappointed that it was a "Robert E." white guy.
Re: The Gyllenhaal Experiment
#118>Chuck Palahniuk I've been reading his books since I found out who wrote Fight Club in 1999. My brain does NOT want to remember how to spell his name. It makes me feel like I have a learning disability.
the first time I heard him say his own name in an interview it was difficult to accept the pronunciation.
Re: The Gyllenhaal Experiment
#119It seems likely that I am not the only person who can't spell Chuck Palahniuk's last name. Edit: Now that I think about it, it might be more accurate to say that nobody can spell Chuck Palahniuk's last name...
Weirdly, his was the only one I got correct.
Re: The Gyllenhaal Experiment
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Including Renault we now have 2 weird ways to spell the O sound in French (eau, eo) and 1 weird silent pair of consonants (lt).
It's not "eo" that gives you the "o" sound, it's just the "o". The "e" is here to prevent the "g" from being pronounced hard, as in "green".
And why is there an e in bureau then? Would burau, buro, burot, burault or bureot be pronounced differently in French?