Tuesday, August 27, 2013

A spelling of the future

[As seen at a highway rest stop. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

My definition: “a misspelling so strange that it must be traveling backward in time to give us a foretaste of our language’s evolution.” Think of it as tomorrow’s spelling today.

You out there: have you seen off  for of?

Other spellings of the future
Aww : Bard-wired : now

comments: 4

Sean said...

I haven't gotten to "off" just yet because I'm still trying to pronounce the double trema (bitrema? tremata"?).

:)

Michael Leddy said...

I was afraid to even mention that. But now I wish I’d looked more closely to see what those marks were. I don’t think they’re handwritten.

Sean said...

A really, really long "u".

"order" almost looks like "oγdeγ" (if that doesn't show, gamma instead of 'r').

Oh, wait -- it all makes sense now, it's just missing a couple of commas. If we accept "oγdeγ" but use the more common "g", we get "og deg". A quick search online says this is Norwegian for "and you". So, it should read: "Out, off, and you."

So it's either poor spelling, or you've clearly stumbled upon the work of an as-of-yet-unknown Greek-born Norwegian existentialist poet. :)

(Occam be damned, I'm going with the second explanation).

Michael Leddy said...

I knew I was missing the obvious here. :)

On a serious note though, awkward characters and haphazard capitalization are things I often saw as a literacy tutor. Sometimes people know only one form of a letter. The r, the capital T, and the self-conscious u make me think that whoever wrote this message isn’t really at home in written language.