Maugham or Maughan?
August 10th 2008 08:56
For many years now I’ve managed to misspell the name of one of New Zealand’s excellent artists, a fellow by the name of Karl Maughan. I’ve misread this as Maugham (like the old writer, Somerset Maugham, whom no one seems to read anymore) and
consequently, every time someone else misspells the name in a search on Google, up pops one of my posts.
This is kind of a handy, though rather embarrassing, way of being found in search results. It’s curious how you can have a certain mental block like this about certain words. On the whole I’m a very good speller, and have been since I was first in my class at school when I was five or six (!) In fact you could say it’s one of my unique baby gifts – that is, I was given it at birth!
But even the best spellers (and I include Microsoft’s Spellchecker in this) have blind spots. One of mine, for many years, was the word, similar. Until a friend pointed it out to me (when I was in my fifties), I’d always spelt it in a way akin to ‘familiar.’ Similiar.
Fifty years of spelling it wrong. Crikey. And no one else appears to have noticed!
Karl Maughan
This is kind of a handy, though rather embarrassing, way of being found in search results. It’s curious how you can have a certain mental block like this about certain words. On the whole I’m a very good speller, and have been since I was first in my class at school when I was five or six (!) In fact you could say it’s one of my unique baby gifts – that is, I was given it at birth!
But even the best spellers (and I include Microsoft’s Spellchecker in this) have blind spots. One of mine, for many years, was the word, similar. Until a friend pointed it out to me (when I was in my fifties), I’d always spelt it in a way akin to ‘familiar.’ Similiar.
Fifty years of spelling it wrong. Crikey. And no one else appears to have noticed!
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