The monkee on my back

I expect that for most people, when playing a simple word association game, the prompt “bed” triggers responses ranging from “sleep” to “sex” to “wet.” For me, however, the word has a special meaning. Because of my dyslexia, I use the word “bed” as a self-invented tool for recognizing the difference between lowercase “b”s and “d”s; I simply imagine the “e” all tucked in and cozy with the rising posts of either letter representing the head and foot boards, and voila, there’s my bed. You might think learning to touch-type would solve my problem once and for all, since I wouldn’t be looking at the letters as I’m writing them. Well, guess again; my “b” and “d” issue is embedded so deeply in my psyche that I often confuse the two even while typing. Suffice it to say that no matter what method I’ve tried, I’ve always had major problems with spelling. In fact, in my copy of My Book About Me, which I completed when I was about seven, I cite “spealing” as my worst subject.

Growing up in a predominantly working-class area of New Jersey, my special lack-of-a-knack for spelling brought me some extra shame and anxiety. My world was one of bulked-up guys driving Z28s, often pulling over to ask, “Did you say somethin’ ’bout my mutha?!” For those of you not familiar with this subtle little dance, the correct response is not “Yes.” Actually, it isn’t “No” either; this is a special kind of rhetorical question to which there is no correct verbal answer. The best response is turn and run as fast as those Chuck Taylors will carry your too-scrawny or too-fat ass. Okay, I sense you’re wondering what the heck this has to do with my whole spelling thing; fair’nough. The connection is this: the knucklehead Jersey attitude wasn’t just out cruising Main Street; it bled into the classroom as well. Teachers were rarely, if ever, willing to consider that a child might have a real problem with any subject, other than a lack of motivation. If a student wasn’t doing well in math, for example, it was merely because the lazy punk wasn’t applying him- or herself. When it came to spelling, even as early as grammar school, I got this attitude in spades.

Mr. Sauter, my fifth-grade-ex-cop teacher, gave us a spelling quiz every Friday. This is normal protocol, but his sadistic little twist was that we graded each other’s quizzes and added up the point totals on the blackboard, girls in one column, boys in the other. The group with the higher score would earn bonus points. You might guess how this worked out for me. I was the collective-sigh inducer among the boys, the one who failed every quiz and kept us from ever winning a single Sauter Sex Spell-off. (No, that isn’t what they were really called.) After the boys were done whining about how sucky it was to have me on their team and the girls were done doing their weekly victory dance, Mr. S would often single me out and say something like: “Well Scott, you’ve let your team down again; it’s a wonder you have any friends at all.” None of this is to suggest that my childhood was any more brutal than anyone else’s; being a kid is a bummer for most everyone. It’s just that my spelling problem placed an added drag on the rest of my classes, not to mention my social life. Ultimately, I failed every subject in Sauter’s class and stayed back to repeat the whole, joyous experience.

What really burns me up about spelling and its sick devotees (among whom are some of the more important people in my life–Hi, Steph!) is that the rules weren’t always this rigid. Despite the impression you may get from reading books like Eats Shoots and Leaves, spelling, for most of the English language’s history, was a somewhat creative endeavor. Those of you who like to read historical documents or manuscripts know what I’m talking about. An excerpt from a letter written by our beloved George Washington reveals that the so-called “Father of Our Country” would have probably fared no better than I in Mr. Sauter’s class: “They convend themselves…and enterd into inclosd Association … to the Northwd.” Huh? Ole’ George isn’t the only patriot-hero who would have earned a place on Mr. S’s shit list. John and Abigail Adams, one of the most celebrated couples in American history, would have been there too. John wrote to Abigail that he would send her “a pamphlet intitled Common Sense.” In response, Abigail lamented how the Tories were “undermineing” the war effort. Ironically, the Adamses would’ve canceled each other out on quiz day. Of course there was a general agreement among the 18th-century educated class about what sounds letters could reasonably make. For example, did you ever wonder why “wheel” and “wheat” have the same hard-e-sound? It’s because both the “ee” and “ea” combinations were interchangeable and acceptable representations. That is, before Noah Webster came along and screwed it all up by waving his arbitrary arbiter wand, codifying spelling once and for all.

Webster, by most accounts, was one of the most miserable, humorless, and (I’m sure) stinky people of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I’m sorry, I must apologize for the ad hominem attack, but compared to the anguish he’s caused me, I’m being quite civil. Chip on my shoulder? You bet, but it’s only a result of the monkee on my back and the aldatross around my neck. I won’t even get started about the sord of Damocleas hanging above my hed.

As I prepare to celebrate my long-sought-after college graduation and look forward to graduate school, and hopefully an academic career, I cringe in embarrassment when I think of all the checks I’ve made out in my life for “fourty” dollars or all the letters I’ve written in which I proclaim how something “ment alot to me.” To be sure, my list of pet misspellings is long and varied. I would just like to take a moment to thank Mr. Sauter and Mr. Webster for reminding me that I’m not special, unique, or gifted; I’m just plain wrong.

11 responses to “The monkee on my back”

  1. Jeremy Zitter says:

    Nice post, Scotty, and welcome to the greatwhatsit. Incidentally, while living in Hawaii I experienced a predicament similar to you and your “bulked-up guys driving Z28s” when I was first asked by one of the “locals only” crowd, “Ho, brah–I saw you was eyeing me out. What, you like beef?!” I was asked that same question exactly 23 million times while living in paradise. Thankfully, I never had to experience that same “knucklehead… attitude” as a student–though, every once in a while (i.e., week 13 during the semester… i.e., right about now), as a teacher, I wish I could bring it into my own classroom…

  2. Scott Godfrey says:

    Jeremy,
    Perhaps you could have Friday afternoon comma-splice contests, thus outing the grammatically challenged in front of the (uncomfortably) giggling class. Just imagine what the punks would have to say about you on ratemyprofessor.

    What’s wrong with me?! Is it not true that the cycle of violence in destined to continue? Will it ever end?

  3. Stephanie Wells says:

    Though I may be a crack speller, my sense (or lack thereof) of something so much simpler–right and left–is still such a handicap for me that I must constantly resort to my own version of your “bed” trick: surreptitously holding up my hands with the thumbs extended at a 90-degree angle, just to quickly check which one forms the “L.” I guess we all have our sords of Damocleas waiting to fall and out us in front of the rest of the mocking classroom.

  4. Robyn says:

    Stephanie, I have to do the same thing! You’d think that after being repeatedly commanded to go right / left in marching band I would’ve gotten those directions down by now, but…nope. Stillll strugglin’.

    Scott, your entry reminded me of a time in 2nd grade when during an oral spelling test one of my classmates mispelled “spoon”. Oh yes, the things I remember. Can’t recall left and right, but the mispelling of “spoons” sticks with me forever.

  5. Scott Godfrey says:

    Let me guess, “S-P-U-N-E; spoon.”

  6. Tim Wager says:

    Hey Scott,

    Judging by the title I thought your essay was going to be about how Peter Tork haunts your very existence. Things took a serious turn along about the third sentence. Dang. I didn’t know about your dyslexia. I like how you don’t take the turn of many ‘illness’ memoir pieces to talk about your overcoming or ‘conquering’ it, but instead use this space to vent some well-earned spleen and to comment on standardization. Education is meant, yes, to elevate and ‘improve’ the individual, but it’s also a method of both rewarding and punishing him/her into obeying random standards that are designed to regulate our lives, primarily for the good of the system and secondarily the individual. The sadistic glee of teachers like Mr. Sauter is, unfortunately, often a crucial component of the plan to accomplish this goal.

    T

  7. WW says:

    Stephanie, I have to do the “L” trick when I’m driving – and even then I can’t for the life of me turn right right when I need to. So glad to know I’m not alone.

    Great Scott Great Post! I do think there are times when your own “incorrect” spelling can be more emotionally correct. ee cummings comes to mind. His own punctuation and his made up words, whether combinations of real words or letter combinations plucked from his mind, lay out the real estate of the heart pretty damn well.

    With regards to stinky Webster, you can simply tell him:
    (we’re everything greater
    than books
    might mean)
    we’re everyanything more than believe…

  8. Scott Godfrey says:

    Yes Tim, as you may be aware, yellow bile is my most pronounced humor. In fact I have this idea for an after school special called My Over-productive Spleen and How it Ruined the Prom.

    Ms. West, Thank you for your kind words about my post, and thank you for bringing such a wonderful Cummings quote to my attention. I do believe that successful communication should be the benchmark of writing. To get a little political / historical: I think that for someone like Webster, the idea of the “great unwashed” having the same grammatical freedom as the landed class was a bit too much. I had a jurisprudence professor who would say that laws, rules, and government can only act to take away freedom; it is impossible to give people freedom because was theirs to begin with. Such a simple statement, but I think quite applicable here.

  9. Dave says:

    Scott, I’d say your jurisprudence professor hadn’t properly digested his Hobbes.

  10. Scott Godfrey says:

    I think the point was that he’d completely digested it (and shat it out). He was certainly more Lockean in his view of the natural state of “man.” Moreover, he was (probably) one of very few Marxist jurisprudence professors in the U.S. Bummer, he died about a year ago.

  11. Gary Hoffman says:

    Scott your entry is so well written and I enjoyed reading it.. I always hated “spelling,” to me just sandtrap rules that kept me from just getting on with what I wanted to write. My seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Maloney, the wife of a retired military general at Fort Bliss in El Paso, would make us stand up in front of the class and spell a complicated word. Since I was a street-crossing-guard lieutenant (big kids helped little kids cross streets in EP back then) I would unfold my lieutenant red badge and belt (the guys working under me had plain-colored badges), and tell Mrs. Maloney I was sorry but it was my shift to go out and check on my “men.” I have tried to get out of spelling (now relying on spell checks) all my life. tu amigo, gary