Wednesday, October 13, 2004
(3:04 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Spelling
Although I was an English major (and in many ways still am), I have never especially prided myself on spelling. Our system of spelling is so obviously irrational and ridiculous that memorizing all the special cases never seemed to be worth it -- I'm good enough at spelling that it doesn't interfere with understanding or become distracting, and that, I feel, is good enough (for instance, I have only run a spell-check on a blog post like twice, and only Cap'n Pete or Adam Robinson have ever pointed out spelling errors, and that's because they want to catch me in an error -- by the way, Cap'n, it's a "web site," not a "web sight").Still, I love to run spell-check on Word and have it turn up no errors, because I'm such a nerd -- in fact, I had to turn off the little green and red underlines because I would waste all my time trying to get them to go away when I was writing.
All this to say: has anyone come up with a good rule of thumb for when it should be "-able" and when it should be "-ible"? I have one of those kinds of errors almost every time I run a spell check on something more than one-page-double-spaced, and it's getting to be a real buzz-kill. I think I just default to "-able" unless I am really sure it's "-ible," and obviously that's not adequate.
