obsession with spelling

I was rather surprised to see the National Spelling Bee televised in prime-time this year. Growing up, the National Spelling Bee barely made an appearance in the newspaper, let alone television. Just today, washingtonpost.com (free registration required) carried three articles above the fold about the bee: Prime-Time Pressure for Top Spellers, 13-Year-Old N.J. Girl Wins Spelling Bee, and Online Gamblers Get Behind Spelling Bee. I guess the spelling bee has come a long way.

My nearly two-decade-long obsession with spelling started, albeit unhealthily, in the fifth grade when I lost the elementary school spelling bee -- in front of the entire school in an assembly. The word: ricotta. I grew up in a rice-based household, so I had no idea what ricotta was, even after asking the moderator for the definition (it's a what kind of cheese?!) and to repeat the pronunciation twice. It's not one of those words that come up in casual reading either. At the time, it only had one pronunciation, ri-'ka-ta. Nowadays, it has two: ri-'ka-ta and ri-'ko-ta (a more accurate Italian pronunciation). Either way, I generally don't eat it (although I have no issues with the taste of it per se).

Nowadays, the obsession manifests itself with me exerting independence from automated spell checkers, bleeding red ink on the occasional documents I happen to edit, and picking out typos from major publications, and even sometimes writing the editors to point it out. Yes, this includes you, washingtonpost.com. One can only imagine how much it burns me up when I see certain mistakes on semi-public works (signs, writing on the Web, and documents in the workplace). Examples: using an apostrophe ('s) to pluralize a noun, affect/effect, alot/a lot, to/too/two, their/there, it's/its, site/sight, assure/ensure/insure, principal/principle, and especially here in DC, capital/capitol, just to name a few. I know not everything has to be perfect, but if one is going for credibility, it's totally shot when there is a misspelling in six-inch high letters.

This is just spelling. Think of what goes on in my head when grammar and typography get put into the mix. I once e-mailed the editor of the science section in a major newspaper about how carbon dioxide is denoted as CO₂ (letter O), not C0₂ (numeral 0), in their article (originally in print, republished on the Web) about global warming. It never got corrected.

Pop quiz: What's the difference (in usage) between a hyphen (-), an en-dash (–), and an em-dash (— or --)? Anybody?

If you're wondering what happened to the girl who beat me in the elementary school spelling bee, she's now a folk/jazz/bluegrass singer touring the country. She might have the better end of the bargain :)