Altarnate Spellings
If you take my writing workshop, you’ll get the speech about opportunistic spelling mistakes. The basic idea is that a respect for spelling and grammar is fine, but a fear of mistakes can be limiting. Most of my students arrive with a terror of the red pen. Even the grown-ups still have nightmares that Mr. Harris or Ms. Clippit (Or in my case, Mrs. Patterson – a troll of a woman in a pink gingham skirt suit, who would swoop in, lift you from your desk chair and shake you like a dusty rug.) are coming after them, scowling and foaming and condemning them to the trash-heap of life for using the possessive “its” when they needed the conjunction “it’s.
I believe in proofreading. I believe that it shows courtesy and consideration and earnestness. I also believe in being ready with curiosity when spelling mistakes occur.
I recently sent out a godforsaken email invite to this blog and in the subject line, I wrote, “My Journey to the Alter.” I misspelled altar again in the body of the email. And in the name of full disclosure, I also wrote “your” when I meant “you’re,” and in my follow-up email (sigh), used the possessive “its” when I needed the conjunction “it’s,” but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
After the short-lived embarrassment, I got right to the joy. Altar. Alter. Hee! It’s too good. I went running, with gleeful anticipation, to my on-line etymology dictionary… Any excuse. It’s word porn, really.
Alter: to change (something), from O.Fr. alterer, from M.L. alterare “to change,” from L. alter “the other (of the two),” from PIE *al- “beyond” + comp. suffix -ter (cf. other). Intransitive sense “to become otherwise” first recorded 1580s
Altar: O.E., from L. altare (pl. altaria), probably originally meaning “burnt offerings” (cf. L. adolere “to worship, to offer sacrifice, to honor by burning sacrifices to”), but infl. by L. altus “high.”
Doesn’t that just give you a chill right up the back of your neck? “The other of the two?” “To become otherwise?” “Burnt offerings?!” Oh my. The two words tango semi-violently, eying each other with fascination. I wonder if I’ll spiritually self-immolate when I say, “I do.”
My married friends all tell me that on the other side of my wedding day, it’ll be different. There is a gravitas when they say, “It changes things…” They let it hang in the air, not revealing the details to the uninitiated. The implication being that, “This is a transformation that can only be gleaned in the experience… It’s dangerous. Not for the faint of heart. But, it’s worth it.” Yikes! And, Oh, boy!
A friend wrote to me, “Spelling is overatted.” A vision of Mrs. Patterson with crazily teased hair arose. This was followed by a delightful fantasy inspired by the movie Ben, in which droves of rodents teem out of the sewers to gnaw all of the red pens into disuse, so that all of the disobediently punny misspellings can goof around, uninhibited, bringing us their playful, and sometimes useful, information.
