During the second semester of my senior year of high school, I founded a school-wide spelling bee that every student in the upper school was forced to sit through in the auditorium. I curated an absurd list of words, coordinated all the logistics, and got a comedian in my grade to host the event while I ran the projection booth upstairs. I love spelling and grammar, and I wish it were more commonly taught and implemented even throughout high school and here at Cornell.
Unfortunately, the digital age – specifically AutoCorrect – has essentially exempted us from needing to know how to spell such beautiful words as cynosure (meaning a focal point of admiration), resplendence (splendid or dazzling in appearance), and callipygous (having a well-shaped buttocks). The digital age has also, in all fairness, made it easier for us to discover such beautiful language because we can Google synonyms of words already in our vocabulary and stumble upon new ones.
This modern era has also frankly been messing with our grammar. I’m not even going to get into “your” vs. “you’re” and all of those because you can probably guess how I feel about that. I will instead focus in on one thing, which I will call the PAS faux pas. The iPhone loves Possessive Apostrophe Sprinkling and it nearly kills me. For example, when I type “Saturdays”, it autocorrects to “Saturday’s”. Thanks to this feature, seemingly everyone I follow on Instagram has been made to believe that “Saturday’s are for the boys.” Saturday’s what? Saturday is not possessing anything in that sentence – not even the boys.
I don’t blame you, Saturdays, or the boys for screwing up your weekend Apple Fest, Homecoming, and wine tour posts. I blame AutoCorrect for normalizing this culture of downright folly.
What can we do to be better? How can we stop this madness? First of all, I recommend following @dictionarycom on Instagram to discover intriguing new words every day and learn how to spell them, if you’re into that. Also, maybe next time you mistype a word and AutoCorrect does its thing, pay more attention so that you know for next time. Being grammar-savvy might not be as much of a resplendent cynosure as being callipygous, but I think it’s pretty cool…
