Little Words & Zed

I've worked many years as a copy editor and have a fairly good memory for spelling. It's amazing really that we ever standardized the English language, if you take into account that there's British English, American English and the bastard child of both, Canadian English. AE and CE say "synchronize" instead of "synchronise", but BE and CE say "neighbour" instead of "neighbor" and "travelled" instead of "traveled." There are a few other odd words such as "jewellery" vs "jewelry." But mostly we can understand each other even if Canadians say "zed" and Americans, "zee." I'm an adamant proponent of continuing the "zed" pronunciation (being Canadian) and when some little tads corrected me with saying, "It's zee." I pretty much bit my lip and corrected them since they're Canadian. Alas the invasion continues.

So is it any wonder that there are so many misspelled words considering that Shakespear spelled his name so many different ways? Of course a lot of this had to to with relative illiteracy. If you didn't write regularly, even if you knew the rudiments, you weren't very likely to spell things correctly.

As an editor, sometimes words are so often misspelled the same way that I start to doubt my own senses and look up words that I know are spelled incorrectly. Here are a few words of the modern age that are mispelled frequently:

• burgundy (not burgandy for colour or wine)
• indefinitely (not indefinately, received three times last week) if it's not finite then it's indefinite like infinity .
• no one (not no-one nor noone)
• its (the most misused word ever: if it is blue then it's blue. If something belongs to it, then it is its.
• twenty, thirty-something (twenty-two not twenty two)

I find it particularly bad when I read books that have many misspellings but it all depends on how good the publishers are at maintaining quality and if they care. Many small publishing houses do not even have copy editors and depend on (demand) the authors to proofread their work. Of course everyone should always do that and hand in relatively clean copies. Still when you're looking at a story over and over again you are bound to miss some of your own typos. A second set of eyes is always best.