Misspelling in Hawaii

Introduction

Earlier this month, my family took a vacation to Kauai.  (There, I typed “Kauai” without misspelling it.  That word, and all Hawaiian words, often trip me up, as “Hawaiian” did just now, and it’s a good thing—perhaps—that  my word processing program instantly flagged the error.)

Where was I?  Oh, right, Hawaii.  I can’t blog about how great a time I had there, because nobody wants to hear about it.  But I also can’t complain about anything, because any complaint that starts out “When I was in Hawaii” isn’t going to generate any sympathy.  And yet, this having been a terribly expensive vacation, I feel like I should somehow get some good blogging mileage out of it (as I have done with an overpriced museum visit and a pricey pair of cycling shoes).  So in this post I’m going to examine the strange sense I got that nobody in Hawaii can spell.

Not that I’m not saying Hawaiians can’t spell.  Somehow, visitors to Hawaii also can’t.

Misspelled food

My family is a foodie bunch.  (Can “foodie” be an adjective?  It can now!)  So perhaps it’s not surprising that the first misspellings we spotted were food-related.  The very first was a section on a menu called “Desert.”  I cut people slack when they (incorrectly) write “just desserts” because when the word “desert” is used as a noun but (correctly) pronounced like “dessert,” to indicate “something that is deserved,” we’re into some pretty arcane English-major territory.  But when a restaurant misses that second “s” in “dessert,” you hope they’re better at hygiene than spelling.  Still, we’d have brushed it off had not another restaurant, a day or two later, made the same error.

Later on, we saw “TACO’S” on the banner for a taqueria called Da Crack, and I decided this wasn’t a deliberate error (along the lines of “da” for “the”) but just an uneducated approach to spelling that treats apostrophes like garnish.  (Too bad Da Crack didn’t have any really good garnish, like cilantro.)

In the case of ethnic food, particularly Asian food, I’m very quick to forgive misspellings, and often count them as a sign of authenticity (along with their cousins, the weird word choices you see like “Fire Burst Stomach Trips” or “Eight Precious Rice Pudding”).  And sometimes Asian restaurant misspellings can be really funny, like “Braised pork in spicy Human sauce.” 

I’m less understanding when it comes to Western misspellings, like we found in our condo.  The hosts had left a handy list of restaurant recommendations, and it had some pretty blatant errors.  For example, a burger place was touted as “a much healthier choose than McDonald’s.”  The name of this burger place?  “Bubba’s Buger.”  This led to lots of corollary jokes (especially popular with my daughters) such as, “Anybody feel like eating boogers tonight?”  But the funniest misspelling on this list was a recommendation for a health food restaurant where we should “order the Acai bowel, full of antioxidants and pure energy.”

Misspelled journal entries

Perhaps you’ve stayed in a bed & breakfast or inn where there’s a nicely bound little journal in which guests can record their feelings about the place.  This journal doesn’t function like Yelp, since you’ve already paid for and occupied the place, so most guests just gush about how great a time they had and how wonderful everything is.  So there’s a lot of gloating, and perhaps some one-upmanship as well (i.e., attempts to be more thoughtful or articulate than the last guy).

Almost every entry in the little book at our Princeville condo had misspellings.  Here is a partial list, courtesy of my older daughter who read them out to me as she went along: 

• beutifil, beutifilly
• foget
• eastun (for “eastern”)
• beatifull
• evere (I had to see this one myself to make sure it wasn’t just a handwriting flourish)
• do able (for “doable”)
• awsome
• well (for “we’ll”)
• what so ever
• cando (for “condo”)
• click our heals (within a “Wizard of Oz” reference)
• use to (for “used to”)

What I found particularly strange about all this is that the people writing in the guidebook didn’t seem slapdash about it; their handwriting was neat and their sentences well-crafted.  None of the entries looked to have been penned by a sloppy t(w)een  (other than that of my own daughter); and there weren’t any LOLs or FWIWs or GR8s or other signs of Gen-Y shorthand.  And yet it costs big bucks to stay in this “cando,” so it’s not like these were uneducated people.  I was, and am, deeply perplexed.

By the way, here is my own condo journal entry, which you can scrutinize for misspellings and/or one-upmanship:

Why so much misspelling?

I suppose it would be very imperialist of me, almost Manifest-Destiny-ish you might say, to judge Hawaiians’ spelling of English words when their native language is so very, very different.  Throughout our vacation I struggled to pronounce the native Hawaiian words that frequently popped up as place names and other proper nouns.  I fared far worse than our GPS narrator when saying, for example, “Ala Kalanikaumaka Street” (though we noticed that the GPS Lady pronounced it a little differently each time).  And yet this is actually pretty straightforward compared to words like “pu’uwai”  and “ku’uipo,” with their surplus of vowels and weirdly placed apostrophes.

Still, I can’t explain away the English misspellings based on the oddities of Hawaiian spelling.  After all, plenty of people are able to master two entirely different alphabets; as a high school student I was pretty good at spelling Russian words correctly.

Could poor spelling be related to the blissful, carefree apathy that comes from drifting your life away in an island paradise?  Well, it is the case that the lovely Anini Beach had been called “Wanini Beach” until the “W” fell off the sign, and rather than fix the sign, the Hawaiians just shrugged their shoulders and let “Anini” become the new name. 

But, as you’ve already noticed, these theories don’t explain why visitors to Kauai, like those writing in the condo journal, can’t spell.  It’s not like something comes over us in the week or two we spend here.   Even my daughter’s journal entry had only one typo—a missing apostrophe—which is exactly the kind of sloppy mistake she makes at home.

And those comical misspellings in the list of restaurant recommendations provided by the condo owners?  Well, the owners don’t actually live in Hawaii.  This is their just guest home.  If memory serves, they live in Texas.

And so, after much reflection, I’ve decided that the misspellings have little to do with Hawaii, and mostly to do with technology—and the lack of it.

Huh?

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the journal in the condo is that it’s the rare example of non-typed text.  Think about this for a second:  how often do you read something handwritten?  The non-typed text I come across generally falls into one of two categories:  1) graffiti, and 2) my kids’ schoolwork.  Do I see misspellings in these kinds of text? 

Why, yes.  Perhaps the only words I see among graffiti that are consistently spelled right are the profanities.  Everything else reflects the fecal-mindedness of the graffitist.  Meanwhile, my twelve-year-old isn’t bad at spelling, but my younger daughter, age ten, still has much room to improve.  A sonnet she wrote recently— which  had very good meter and perfect rhyme, and which was very deep, being a letter to her future teenage self, bagging on herself in advance and promoting nostalgia for a time when she wasn’t “blotet [sic] and lazy”—contained no fewer than twenty-three spelling errors.

Aside from graffiti and kids’ stuff, virtually everything I read is typed, and our modern means of typing have all kinds of built-in technology to (help) eradicate misspellings and typos.  The original tool, the spell-checker, not only identifies errors but arguably helps people learn from their mistakes.  The spell-checker is not a perfect tool—for example, it’ll catch “buger” but not “Acai bowel”—but it’s been masking poor spelling fairly effectively for about thirty years now.  (At least, when it’s turned on.  I’m going to assume that restaurant people just aren’t very good with computers.)

The problem is, the classic spell-checker is losing out to more modern tools that are less educational.  Smartphones have features that enable you to type sloppily, generating character strings that only remotely resemble words; the operating system is smart enough to make good guesses at what you’re trying to type.  I can type “t-y-p” and it suggests “type,” “types,” “typo,” and “typed” and I can touch any of these to accept that word.  This is especially handy with trickier words like “beautiful.” 

When I’m on my smartphone I use the Swype technique, aka slide-typing, where I drag my finger through the letters of a word and, amazingly, the OS recognizes these words, no matter how sloppy I get.  It’s not so good with “Acai” or “mahalo” but does great with most common English words.  If I Swype “beutifil” it seamlessly corrects it to “beautiful,” just as it discreetly turns “awsome” to “awesome.”  Typing in this way, a person could generate readable text for decades without ever learning how to spell.  This is just great, until you’re suddenly forced to use a pen and paper to compose your message.

So, if you think the spelling is bad now in handwritten messages, just you wait.  We’re seeing the mere lack of spell-checker now; in another couple decades, when Gen-Y starts making enough money to rent “candos,” they’ll be even less well equipped to work out tricky words like “bowl” and “awesome” on their own.

Epilogue:  voice recognition

Do people also use voice recognition software to compose messages?  I don’t know.  I suspect that this technology is mainly used for giving instructions to your phone, and that the modern generation prefers the silence of typing and Swyping.  That said, it’s hard to really tell.  When you see a guy walking down the sidewalk yakking on his smartphone, he could either a) be having an old-fashioned voice conversation, b) be dictating a message to his e-mail program, or c) be a crazy person talking loudly to nobody or nothing at all, with the phone held up as a prop.

As it happens, I did investigate the efficacy of voice-recognition for large bodies of text:  because I find Swype typing tedious (and didn’t have a laptop with me on vacation), I dictated a restaurant review to my phone.  Needless to say, I’ll be making that review available on albertnet:  maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

The Grammar Wars

Introduction

I wouldn’t say I pride myself on knowing grammar.  To me, this is a strange thing to be proud of because grammar is simply a set of rules that anybody can learn.  To be a great artist or musician is to contribute something unique to the world, whereas using—and even defending—good grammar ought to be something everybody does.

I notice people’s grammar errors all the time, but almost never point them out.  Sometimes, though, my merciful nature is not observed or appreciated.  For example, a couple decades ago I happened to see the notes a colleague had taken when checking my job references.  She’d interviewed my old bike shop boss, and asked him about my language skills.  “He was always correcting people’s grammar,” my boss had told her.  Maybe he thought he was helping.  I’m lucky this didn’t cost me the job.

The following post concerns a recent debate over correct usage, while delving into some past history to provide context and, I hope, amusement.

The journalists

The other night my wife hosted a dinner party for some old friends from her journalism days.  A couple of them chatted away at the kitchen table while I poured myself a beer at the counter.  “What are you doing?” E— asked.

“I’m pouring a beer,” I said.  The other guest, R—, said, “Yeah, but what’s with the…” (here she mimed how I’d been swishing the beer around in the bottle).

“Well, it’s a Belgian style beer so I’m swishing around the last third of it before pouring it, while chanting my personal mantra,” I replied.  (I wasn’t exactly chanting; it was more of a whisper.)  R— asked what my personal mantra was.  I’m a bit embarrassed by it, so I dodged:  “It’s a brief statement that lasts just the right amount of time, to make sure you swish the beer long enough.  The actual content of the mantra isn’t important.”

“Yes, but what is the content?” she persisted.  Given the natural curiosity of journalists, there was no getting out of it.  I replied, “It’s ‘I … WILL … NOT … LOSE … EVER.’  I guess I say it ironically, because in fact I lose all the time.”

Improper usage

I sat down at the table with the journalists to enjoy my carefully poured beer and some French bread E— had brought.  Though it was good, he apologized that it wasn’t better:  “It’s from Boulange.  I don’t like it as much as” (here he named some bakery I’d never heard of).  “I love their bread because it’s … artistic-y.”

I replied, “I’m glad you said ‘artistic-y.’  I was afraid you were going to say ‘artisanal,’ which isn’t even a word.”  (“Artistic-y” isn’t either, of course, but it’s not pretending to be.)  R— jumped in, “Oh, I hate ‘artisanal’!  Is that true, it’s not a word?  I so want that to be true.”  I replied that it wasn’t in my dictionary. 

(I actually got into some trouble recently over this word.  In a recent blog post I’d written, “I’d be no less astonished if Burger King introduced a grass-fed Kobe beef burger with prosciutto and imported Gruyere on an artisanal semolina bun.”  Of course I should have put “artisanal” in quotation marks to show I was using it ironically.  A cycling pal e-mailed me (cc’ing our bike club), “Cool story. But really artisanal bread.  Hate the word artisanal.  Its so safeway target esque.”  His own poor spelling and punctuation aside, he had a point.  I replied, “True, ‘artisanal’ is a bonehead word, but doesn’t it seem like exactly the term Burger King would use?”)

Since the journalists and I were now on the subject of words we hate, and since I’d had a pent-up desire to vent about it anyway, I brought up my latest pet peeve, which is people pronouncing “processes” with a long “e” at the end, so it sounds like “process-ease.”  I hear this all the time and it rankles.  But E— didn’t agree.  “I’m pretty sure I’ve said ‘process-ease,’” he said carefully.  R— suggested we look it up, and seconds later both E— and R— were pulling out their smartphones.  I cried foul.

“You can’t trust the Internet for such stuff,” I said.  “There are too many pretend Internet facts.  You can support anything that way.  I’ll get a real dictionary.”  I went for my wife’s giant Webster’s Third New International unabridged dictionary.  (I’m embarrassed to say I had to ask where she keeps it.)

E— admired the dictionary, and challenged me to confirm that it’s unabridged.  As I thumbed through it, I said, “We had one of these growing up.  We called it ‘the big dick.’”  (Which is what a person runs the risk of being called if he’s too emphatic about word-related arcana, I privately reminded myself.)  To my horror, this noble dictionary seemed to support “process-ease.”

That “sēz” sure didn’t bode well for me.  I can’t remember exactly what E— said, but it was something like “Read it and weep!”  His triumphant delivery brought to mind Muhammad Ali’s jeer to the journalists who’d doubted him:  “Eat your words!”  E— had vanquished me utterly … or so it seemed.  But before I get to the rest of the story (don’t write off your humble blogger just yet) let’s explore why E— seemed to get such a thrill from proving me wrong.

My scrapper chops

The experience of zealously going toe-to-toe with word-lovers is nothing new to me, and probably not to E— or R— either.  I suppose any logophile will pursue his defense of the language with much vigor, but I doubt that’s the sole reason for E— ’s triumphant tone .  I suppose my recently disclosed personal mantra—“I WILL NOT LOSE EVER”—also came into play.  Indeed, I never expect to lose in such matters, and surely E— and R— could sense this.

Okay, I’ll just say it:  when it comes to grammar, I can be cocky.  For example, I hadn’t hesitated to bash “artisanal,” and my declaration that it’s not a word was kind of a bluff—I’d only ever checked in one dictionary.  (As it turns out, it’s in one of my dictionaries but not the other).  Nor had I paused to consider the possibility that E— and/or R— might routinely say “process-ease” and be offended that I disparaged that pronunciation.  Looking back, I see I was pretty bold in my assertions.  Who wouldn’t want to take me down?

You may be wondering how, if I almost never try to correct people’s grammar, I have such confidence?  Well, there is one important exception to my anti-bashing rule:  for decades I have ruthlessly policed my brother Bryan’s grammar.  It’s reciprocal.  We don’t find fault very often but when we do, we never let it slide.  We do a little dance.  For example, in an online chat Bryan once wrote, “He got his just desserts.”  As you yourself immediately noticed, this is wrong.  I fired back, “Of course what you meant to type was ‘just deserts,’ since it’s from the word ‘deserve,’ having nothing to do with dessert.” There’s an odd procedural form Bryan and I use when we correct each other.  We never say, “You bonehead, that’s bad grammar!”  Instead, we always say “Of course what you meant to say was….”  I think this is to intensify the pain of the barb by being perfectly gentlemanly.

Now, in decades of calling out each other’s grammar errors, neither of us has ever actually defended himself in earnest.  I suppose this is because we are both absolutely certain that the other wouldn’t call out an error unless he was damn sure it was an error.  When Bryan read my “just deserts” comment, he must have immediately grasped that the fact of a bakery called “Just Desserts” doesn’t make the spelling right; it’s a deliberate misspelling in service of a lame pun, like the restaurant “Thai-rrific” or the upstairs barbershop “We’re Up Hair.” 

Naturally, Bryan recognized that defending something like “just desserts” would be rhetorical suicide.  On the other hand, he can’t admit defeat, because I’m his little brother.  (When the tables are turned, I can’t admit defeat either, because I have an English degree and he doesn’t.)  So whenever we’re called out, our response is one of two dodges.  One—and the wording varies so little that I can give this pretty much verbatim—is, “Yes, I know, I was just speaking in the vernacular … you know, coming down to your level.”  The other (which is more appropriate with a misspelling) is, “Yes, I know, I was just testing you, and I’m pleasantly surprised that you passed.”

When I think about it, it’s plain to see that my routine battles with Bryan, coupled with our tradition of denying wrongfulness, surely inflect my overall attitude toward grammar, reinforcing the cockiness I mentioned earlier. 

My “cornered badger” policy

Upon further reflection, I realize that there are a couple more exceptions to my policy of not pointing out grammatical errors.  For one thing, I consider it my duty as a parent to always correct my kids’ mistakes (and if I get a “what-ever” response, there’s a secondary debate about why grammar matters).  In addition, I can be ruthless when somebody tries to “correct” me when I’m not actually wrong.  Since, in this situation, I can’t be seen as a bully, nor can I be faulted for undue linguistic precision, I take such challenges as an invitation—as a mandate, even—to defend myself.

Here’s an example.  Back in the ‘80s, my friends and I had a dinner party where we met one guy’s new girlfriend for the first time.  I liked her well enough I guess, until she committed what I considered a major gaffe.  I’d said to the group, “There’s ice cream for whoever wants it,” and she interjected, “You mean ‘There’s ice cream for whomever wants it.’” 

That she was rude, and wrong, was bad enough, but the nature of her attempted correction made things worse.  In my opinion, using “whom” where “who” is called for is the worst kind of blunder.  If somebody makes the inverse mistake, using “who” where “whom” is called for, he or she is either making a very understandable error (after all, “who” vs. “whom” is complicated) or might be deliberately using incorrect grammar to avoid seeming stodgy and punctilious.  I myself have occasionally avoided “whom” even when it’s the correct word, so as to not alienate somebody (for example, a work contact known for his highly approximate grammatical usage).  When I hear an erroneous “who” or “whoever” I’ll never call the speaker out on it, unless it’s my brother or one of my kids.  Thus, when I use “who” or “whoever” correctly, and then somebody displays a toxic blend of ignorance and gall in telling me I’m wrong, I come out with both barrels blazing.

I walked the girlfriend through the grammar.  “Look, ‘whoever’ is the subject of its clause, and ‘whomever’ would be used only if it were the object.”  She fired back, “But you wouldn’t say, ‘I gave ice cream to whoever.’”  Yes, I acknowledged, but that’s because “whomever” in that sentence would be the object of a preposition, whereas in my sentence, “whoever” is the subject, and the whole clause “whoever wants it” acts (collectively) as the object of the preposition.  (To be honest, I’m not even sure “to whomever” would ever be right … but no matter.)

The girlfriend realized her error, and—to her credit—admitted it.  But she continued to defend herself:  “I only got that wrong because I never actually learned grammar, like, you know, from a book.”  Here’s where I think I’ve matured:  today, I would leave it at that.  But back then, being a belligerent teen, I feigned surprise:  “You mean you were born knowing this stuff?  That’s impressive.  I was born without any language skills at all, and had to learn everything I know.”  Yes, this was a lot snottier than she deserved.  (It didn’t end up mattering, because she didn’t date my friend very long.  Either she was a psycho or he was a jerk, depending on whose side you took.  Probably they were both right.)

Back to “process-ease”

And now it’s time for the rest of the story.

As I stared in disbelief at the pronunciation guide for “process” in the Webster’s dictionary, E— took a victory lap by seeking further corroboration online.  I decided to further investigate the notation in my Webster’s:  “sometimes ÷|,se(,)sēz.”  The “sometimes” didn’t help much, but what was this division symbol?  I cursed myself for never figuring out how to use a proper dictionary, and flipped through the thick tome’s opening pages looking for “÷.”  Finally I found it and was richly rewarded:

“Aha!” I cried.  “The division sign indicates that many regard as unacceptable the pronunciation that follows!”  As I prepared to parlay this finding into full redemption, E— suddenly discovered, online, a very germane discourse on “process-ease” by a guy named Bernie Zimmerman.  At first this blurb seemed to validate E—’s position.  “Listen,” E— said, “‘To this day [process-ease] still sounds strange to me, but the more I hear it in everyday use, the less I feel confident about the way I've always pronounced it, which is similar to the way I pronounce the last syllable of the word glasses.’”  E— seemed to be on the way to scoring another point.  “I don’t like this Zimmerman guy,” I said.

But then E— scanned further down on his screen and said, “Whoah, what’s this?  ‘In recent years there has been a tendency to pronounce the plural ending -es of processes as “-ēz,” perhaps by analogy with words of Greek origin such as analysis and neurosis. But process is not of Greek origin, and there is no etymological justification for this pronunciation of its plural.”  By this point we were all cackling with pleasure, nerds that we are.  E— read on, “However, because this pronunciation is not uncommon even in educated speech, it is generally considered an acceptable variant, although it still strikes some listeners as a bungled affectation.”  (Italics his.  Well, sort of his.  They’re my attempt at conveying the emphatic delight with which he read that phrase).

I knew at once that this last statement had won E— and R— over to the traditional pronunciation of “processes.”  You can always count on a word-lover to prize accuracy over simply prevailing in a dispute.  For a moment I felt vindicated.  “Actually, I think I like this Zimmerman guy!” I said.  E— replied, “Well, he’s actually quoting Answers.com here.”

D’oh!  No matter how persuasive the “bungled affectation” argument was, I’d already expressed my misgivings about “pretend Internet facts.”  As I hadn’t intended to regard Internet research as admissible, I couldn’t very well cite Answers.com just because it happened to agree with me.  I needed something more.  So I decided to consult my (software-based) American Heritage Dictionary, because it has lots of usage notes on debated word forms, and maybe, just maybe, would include a useful commentary about “process-ease.”  This was a Hail Mary, but I felt it was all I had.

Here’s what this dictionary shows for pronunciation of “processes”:

Needless to say this isn’t very helpful.  Probably owing to compatibility issues between MS-DOS and Windows, the special characters look like an excerpt from a book about bridge, or a collection of ‘70s pendants.  The presence of two different plural pronunciations did worry me.

Scrolling down, I was glad to find this very compelling usage note:

Look familiar?  In this instance, Answers.com was quoting directly from the American Heritage Dictionary.  Thus, with the legitimacy of the “bungled affectation” zinger no longer in question, my redemption was complete.  I can now safely assume that neither E— nor R— will be saying “process-ease” anymore … and that’s really all I ever wanted.  That and some playfully barbed banter with people who care about words.

By the way, if you feel like defending “process-ease” yourself, feel free to comment below or e-mail me.  Since it’s not your grammar in question here, I think I can engage you in a debate without violating my policy of ignoring people’s grammatical errors.  In other words, BRING IT!

Update

Be sure to check out the comments below, and click here for my rebuttal to them.