Dear Daughter

Hopefully your first day of school was wonderful, but not so wonderful that you will want to stay in college forever! I’m torn whether to say that spell check makes Life Great or has dulled my brain? It did fail me yesterday in the title of my post and I really hate the auto-correct on text messages – you kids probably have that turned off because you don’t even bother with full words or punctuation.  Really confuses the old man.

That said, Spell Check along with its grammar suggestions have been helpful and corrected some hideous things I’ve typed out, but not nearly enough at times! Of course, now I can’t spell to save my life since I’m completely dependent on tech to tell me how to spell words and remind me of every important phone number that I once knew, but couldn’t even guess at today to save my life.

But what the heck, let’s say it’s a good thing! It does allow me to type faster without being concerned about misspelling since I hope a little red line will highlight what needs correcting afterwards. I don’t know if you ever typed something on an actual typewriter? Those were very paranoid days, where fingers were much more cautious about striking the keys. People paused when typing and actually looked up words in a book before typing them out. You didn’t need to see the amount of Whiteout (correction white liquid) on someone’s paper to know whether they were good spellers because that stuff got all over your hands and then spilled on over backpack and school folders and the world would know you were the kind of person that needed lots of Whiteout and were in a mad panic the night before to finish your paper! Unless of course you were rich enough to have a typewriter that had the correction ribbon.  But why bother getting into that, I might as well tell you about churning butter too.

Anyway, use spell check and for goodness sake, make sure it’s set to check things written in all caps and on titles!

Dad

New Word of the Day: (Notice a pattern here in the word selection?)

“You should be magnanimous by showing deference to your father by acquiescing to his desire not to be corrected.”

Deference  (noun):

1. respectful submission or yielding to the judgment, opinion, will, etc., of another.
2. respectful or courteous regard: “in deference to my dad’s wishes, I did not correct his misspelling.”

Previous Words of the Day:   

Acquiesce  (verb): to assent tacitly; submit or comply silently or without protest; agree; consent: “to acquiesce halfheartedly in a business plan.”