chrishansenhome

I got a reference from The Register for The Times (of London) Spelling Bee. The website shows a game which you can play...click on the button, and a little robot comes out of the left, adjusts one of his antennae into a microphone, and proceeds to speak. You are required to type each word into a box. At the end, you get your score. You can then place your cursor on any word in "red" (which you misspelled) to find the real spelling. See how I did below



Now, I consider myself a good speller. But when the robot said "READ" and I typed "REED" I can't see that I got that one wrong. Spelling "BALLOON" as "BELLOON" is a typo, pure and simple. Yes, I can spell "BALLOON".

Maybe the Guardian, also known as the Grauniad for its love of misspelling and homophone confusion, should take this one over.

Your Linguistic Profile::

45% Yankee

25% General American English

20% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

The test was deficient. They asked a question about what I called a sweetened carbonated beverage. The choices were "soda", "pop", "Coke". They did not allow the word "tonic" as an answer, which is what I called it as a young stripling. When asked what I called the appliance that you drink water from, the choices were "drinking fountain" and "water fountain", not "bubbler", which is what we called it in my misspent yoof.

So I demand a recount!

From this story, in and of itself somewhat out-of-the ordinary (about a 104-year-old woman marrying a 33-year-old man [his first marriage, her 21st]), comes this paragraph:

Malaysian Muslim men are allowed by their religion to take up to four wives at a time, but reports of women who marry more than once are rare. Muslim women do not practice polygamy.

I was not living with the illusion that any Muslim women married more than one woman at a time. Obviously the reporter knows something the rest of us do not.