I saw a mistake this week in a post on Facebook I hadn’t seen in some time, but which used to be sort of common.
Someone from a local group had put out a sort-of press release, which one of the notes being that they recognized they were on the “unseeded” territory of the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation.
A few years ago, the mistake for “unceded” was more common, since the word had not been used very often until then.
And, of course, to the surprise of many, SpellCheck or programs like that wouldn’t pick up on the mistake, since both ‘unceded’ and ‘unseeded’ are recognized English words. I still find it difficult to comprehend how many people seem to figure a spell-checking program will automatically pick up on all their mistakes.
It won’t.
Something as basic as mistaking ‘its’ and ‘it’s’ will be passed over by the program, as will something less obvious like ‘conversation’ and ‘conservation’.
This is why newspapers I worked at insisted that every story be checked over by someone (preferably not the original writer) for spelling mistakes. Why not the original writer? They made the mistake the first time, they know what it’s supposed to say, and that’s how they’re likely to read it the second time through.
While I was tempted to use this as the topic for this week’s column because of ‘unseeded’ and ‘unceded’, I saw another error which is still fairly common.
Someone said she would meet a friend at the mall, and wrote she would “defiantly” be there.
If I were her friend, I would be less interested in her attitude and more in being ‘definitely’ sure she was going to be there.
What do you think about this story?