I just realized I’ve been saying — and spelling — something incorrectly, just about forever; BRUSSELS SPROUTS! I can’t believe I’ve been calling those little veggies Brussel sprouts — Brussel singular — rather than plural.
In the grocery store’s produce section, that’s where I was when I realized how wrong I’ve been all these years; when I spotted the name boldly emblazoned on cartons of Brussels sprouts.
Suppose, as a kid, I happened to be competing in a spelling bee, and lost, all because of Brussels sprouts?
Encyclopedia! Now there’s a challenging word, for you. But I would have gotten that one right because of a neat trick teachers taught us in school. You learned a tune with a cadence that helped you spell encyclopedia a few letters at a time. Like this; enc-yc-lo-pe-dia. Even now, I can’t spell encyclopedia without humming the tune.
Funnily enough, as the British say, had I typed Brussel sprouts, as I was working on this article, that squiggly red line that comes up under misspelled words would have been there, squarely beneath Brussel. As a matter of fact, I got a squiggly red line when I typed funnily at the beginning of this paragraph; I spelled it with an ‘A’… funnaly enough.
This technology sure is something. As I was reading a food product label, while at the store, plowing through the small type, wondering whether the ingredients were good for us, or not, my wife pointed her phone at something called the sku on the package of food. That’s a product code, she explained, and an app on her phone actually graded the food product by reading the sku. This particular product got a B-plus. Not bad, I suppose, unless there was an A-plus product somewhere else on the shelf?
By the way, that word; sku, I had to look it up, online of course, and when I did, it was spelled the way it sounds when you say it. But then again, it could have been spelled scu or scue or even skew.
Harvey Radin is former senior vice president in charge of corporate communications and media relations, Bank of America Western Region. He makes his home in Redwood City, CA.