Lost in space

I have started this sentence three times. The first time, it was a reference to my friend, CTV reporter Bill Fortier, and the sentence was going to refer to his commitment to proper spelling. But I couldn't think my way out of that sentence (I love that sense of sentence, actually, because it captures what it's like to feel imprisoned by the written word), so I abandoned it by pressing the DELETE button 10 or 12 times. 

Then, I re-started the sentence, this time by referring to what it's like to be married to an editor, and how that changes the way you read and re-read for spelling errors. But that was silly. Not being married to an editor, don't get me wrong. I just couldn't think my way out of that one, either. DELETE, DELETE, DELETE, DELETE, etc....

And that got me thinking about the DELETE key. It's like time travel. With a flash of a finger up to the top right of the keyboard it's possible to zip back into the recent past and re-do your thoughts, re-work your message, get it right. Okay, it's not time travel, but it is amazing to watch the cursor swim back right to left against the usual linear current as it looks to rescue the flailing thought or the sinking spelling.

All of this is by way of thanking Alex, our  (that "our" started as "or" until the DELETE-UR keystrokes) Tacitus-rading (oops) TA (oops oops) Tacitus-reading Arts student who pointed out that "proud to be apart of Premier Alison Redford's team" is not quite the same as "proud to be a part of Premier Alison Redford's team." Read that last sentence! Especially if you wrote it!

This isn't spelling snobbery. It's just that I love typos. I love typos because we just can't eradicate them. They sneak in, the laugh at us, they're little grotesques who won't bow to the computer's control. They're messy. And they remind us that life is, too. 

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