We were watching the CBC news the other night as is our habit before retiring – just so we can toss and turn for a couple of hours as we digest all the bad news.
The redeeming factor with the CBC National News is that they usually end with a pleasant clip of something that gives us hope in the human condition. One of the lead stories that night was about the forest fires in British Columbia. There was little prospect of cooling rain in the weather forecast but that hope was watered down by the threat of 'lightening.'
I said to my wife, "do they mean the clouds are going to thin and let the sun shine through the smoke so the people can better assess their dangerous position?"
"Alas, no," she said, "they cannot spell lightning."
It’s embarrassing to watch the National News, viewed around the world, and see careless spelling in the headline.
Perhaps, says I, it was not carelessness, simply a case of not knowing how to spell something as common as lightning. Back in the day, if you didn’t spell something such as lightning correctly in grade 3 the teacher would very politely correct you with a hand-held device and you would not get a yellow star on your accomplishment chart.
Lightning was not a problem for me but thunder was. My Uncle had a saying when he was upset about some minor thing like the farm tractor not starting: “Tunder and lightning!” he would say and I, being as absorbent as a sponge for my uncle’s cusses and colourful use of the English language, did not catch the silent ‘h’ and misspelled the word for several years.
Nary a thunderstorm passes overhead but my wife will expound on Lucretius and his murmuring thunder. Lucretius does a fair job explaining tunder and lightning in The Nature of Things: “And so in first place, then with thunder are shaken the blue deeps of heaven, because the ethereal clouds, scudding aloft, together clash, what time ‘gainst one another. . .”
Nowadays spell check would catch the error and if you knew which suggestion to accept, you could select the correct word and bee on your way, thumbs flying. Of coarse, if you do not know the difference between your and you’re your in deep do do or is that dew dew? You no what I mean but you should not use that word on the internet where the little ones might see it.
The thing is, one must be very cautious about everything that leaves one’s keyboard, text-emitting cell phone, or heaven forfend, your social media comments. What one person (and you hope that it is the one you addressed) finds hilarious can cause another to call the PC Police. Darn, I already did it again by saying ‘heaven’ and offending my atheist friends. I can say ‘atheist’ can I not – we are a minority and surely have some rights or do we offend some people with our moniker? We have rid ourselves of the G moth – what about the M butterfly? And the B eagle? The G shepherd and the B Widow spider?
I almost stepped in it again the other day when my friend was showing me his granddaughter’s drawing. Little Sarah had coloured the grass yellow and the sky a nice shade of orange with the appropriate white clouds and a green pine tree. Most of us know that grass is green unless it has been burned brown by cinch bugs or showered by the neighbour’s dog and so I raised a discreet eyebrow in question of the colour selection. It turned out that the family had passed a day in the country and the canola was in full yellow bloom whilst the sky had the forest-fire smoke orange appearance at sunset. What to my untrained eye was mis-colouring, was in fact an accurate reminder of the day in the country.
In a recent article, I tried to take a swipe at the anti-vaccers and their ridiculous thinking but ended up exasperating some readers who thought I was promoting the cause, not denigrating the stance of those who refuse to get the vaccine for ideological reasons. What would they have thought of the yellow grass and orange sky? They would likely have taken the crayons away . . .
A person must be careful when using crayons or pencils because not everyone who sees or reads your artistic endeavors will draw the same conclusions. Too many people probably ignored the spelling of lightening that evening, and indeed they likely understood the intention of the piece when the news reader said rain, storms, and forest fires. Yet, I do lament the deterioration of our languages by misuse, mispronunciation, spelling, alphabetizing, and substitution of other languages into the one being spoken at the time. Visiting the United States, one soon misses the Queen’s English and the spellings we were taught in school. Nonetheless, being mistaken for a Vermonter is better than being labelled a Bostonian (no offence intended Bruins fans).
Of course, languages change with our new experiences and the mixing of cultures and I suppose the Americans can be forgiven or excused for dropping the ‘u’ in so many words. A check is a cheque as long as it doesn’t bounce. A pizza is a pizza anywhere in the world. One of my favourite new words is ‘destinesia’ – forgetting where you were going and why you are standing on the porch in your red pajamas.
Anyway, as we were preparing for a post-Covid family reunion, I remembered my uncle calling these gatherings ‘Family Rebellions’ and judging from the last one we had, that may be the proper description. I’m taking a two-four of Frisky Pete’s just in case of rain, or tunder and lightening.
