Game shows and the English Language
During last couple of months, I have been working on my writing skills. As those of you who have known me for a while can confirm, my writing skill are sometime rough. The reason for this is I am dyslexic. My brain does not store words with a normal connection to their meaning. In my head the words, ‘sever’ and ‘server’ are the same. It takes a long time to track down in my brain what word I am looking at. To compensate I do a lot of guessing when I read. I use the context to guess at the word.
Now this has caused a problem. That problem is in editing the stuff I write. My brain knows what it says, so there for guessing is easy. My brain says ‘you meant this’ and it sounds correct. This has been a challenge to over come. To over come this, I have needed to if a way to remove the words from there meaning.
Enter 70’s game show theory. Do you remember the Match Game? In the show, a contestant read a sentence such as “large Marge was so fat, she had a blank for a house.” The contestant then gave a word to fill in the blank. This use of the word ‘blank’ to mask the meaning of a sentence is very useful to me. The replacing nouns and verbs with the word ‘blank’ I found that I could read the words of the sentence with out guessing.
Between this and the spell-check, I can now read what I write. I still have a long way to go, but by the wonder of 70’s game shows, I can edit the things I write. Now if I could find a way to stop spelling in homonyms.