My favorite thing about the internet is that we have to type [for the most part] what we want to say. I seek out comment sections just so I can read things from people like this:

“This shirs starting to scare me.”

It took me a few rounds to figure out this person was trying to say ‘sure is.’ Its like a game of hidden objects. You have to find the words or phrases that aren’t auto-correct goofs or just typos. The ones you know they fought the auto-correct to put in their box of text.

I’m not denying that I’m the last person to be critiquing anyone’s spelling or grammar. I just find it intriguing that before the Internet, you could go years speaking to someone or listening to people, who may have been saying ‘shirs’ believing it was ‘sure as’ as much as you heard it as ‘sure as.’

My mom used to say ‘behooves’ to me all the time when I was younger. I knew it was a kind of advice, but I thought the consequences of not heeding the advice were delivered by bees with horse feet, a kind of hive of bee centaur creatures. I have no idea when I realized she wasn’t talking about bees with horse hooves, but I’m glad I didn’t learn the difference on the internet while telling someone that something ‘beehoved’ them.

And I suppose that example isn’t a very good one since the correct spelling is so very close to the 9 year old extraneous e spelling I would have typed out on some message board about roller skating, Star Wars, Grease, Three’s Company, or Space Invaders. Or how my brothers had locked me out of the hose after school and made me crawl through the dog door to get back inside.

I don’t know how old I was when my mom had to talk to me about spelling numbers, either. Apparently I had taken to writing, for example, ‘40’ or ‘fourty’ as 4D. 4D3. etc. I do know that 9 year old me is really happy that other people hear things and run with it before confirming things like spelling or the lack of bee horse enforcer creature. I’m almost sorry that the internet shines such a bright light on it so soon. There’s something intriguing about where the mind goes when it has no clear path.