NATION NOW

With autocorrect, does spelling matter? Linguistic experts say yes

Mary Bowerman
USA TODAY Network
Spellers compete for the judges during round three of the preliminaries at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in National Harbor, Maryland. More than 280 spellers from eight countries will compete this year for the title of champion at the 88th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee.

What does feuilleton mean?

If you're scratching your head while watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee and thanking your lucky stars for autocorrect, you're not alone.

But before you turn your back on spelling, think about all the times autocorrect failed you, says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the school of information at UC Berkeley.

He says the Scripps National Spelling Bee is the X Games of spelling. Before viewers start questioning their intelligence, they should remember the spelling bee is meant to showcase a participant's ability to memorize an arbitrary set of rules to spell words "that many of us have never heard of and will never use."

So, while you might never need to spell the words in the spelling bee, spelling in general has immense value, Sandra Disner, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Southern California, said in an email.

"Spelling provides a standard through which we can ensure maximum understanding of documents, stories and literature," Disner said.

Nunberg and Disner tell USA TODAY Network why spelling still matters in the real world. And what bad spelling says about a person.

Q: Is spelling as important as it used to be?

Disner says spelling is more important than ever.

"It erases spoken dialect features which are often unintelligible to others and provides maximum comprehension for readers of hundreds of millions of documents written by diverse groups of speakers," she says.

While autocorrect might seem like an easy option, it's not perfect.

"People don't learn to spell from autocorrect, and it doesn't help you when you have two spellings, a homophone, like need and knead, or grammatical issues like its and it's with an apostrophe," Nunberg said.

Q: What do spelling mistakes say about a person?

Regardless of how informal text messaging and emails have made our everyday communication, spelling and grammar still matter, according to Nunberg. He says employers and acquaintances still make snap decisions, sometimes "unfairly," about people based on spelling errors.

He says mistakes typically fall under three tiers.

"There is the tier of fairly common words where misspellings are taken as an indication of poor education," he says. An example would be spelling "separate with an e, seperate."

He says the midlevel words, like minuscule and refrigerator, are words "that most educated speakers know and use but not everyone can spell."

Those mistakes aren't an indicator of superior education or literacy but "more of a question of visual memory," according to Nunberg. He says if he gave an undergraduate class four different spellings of accommodate, only 40% would choose the correct version.

"Some very good writers can get them, and some can't," Nunberg says.

So, where do the spelling bee champions fall? The words that participants are owning are the words that fall into the "stunt words" category, according to Nunberg. Think ursprache, laodicean and prospicience.

"These are words that no one knows," he says. " They are words that many people have never seen in their lives and no one needs to spell."

Q: Are Americans spelling more things incorrectly?

It just takes a quick Google search to see spelling mistakes from top news outlets to personal blogs. It's not that spelling is getting worse, it's just easier to see the mistakes.

"It's not that people don't spell as well, but their writing before now was reserved for the refrigerator door, and now it's bubbling up in emails and all over the Internet," he says.

With the click of a button that spelling error we might have made in a letter is now posted online.

Nunberg says if you think autocorrect will save you, you're wrong. Autocorrect in many ways has made people worse in their daily communication by confusing words.

"Many times autocorrect makes off-the-wall suggestions and you see spelling errors that could only come from a spelling corrector, no human misspells the word this way," he says.

Disner says she has a long list of unfortunate experiences that stem from spell check.

"The statistically most likely word is often not the intended word," she says.

Q: What is the background of the spelling bee?

Long before ESPN3 began live streaming the Scripps National Spelling Bee, people paid less attention to spelling, according to Nunberg. Prior to the 19th century, there was far less emphasis on correct spelling, he added.

"Thomas Jefferson didn't know how to spell, and people weren't expected to spell. It was a skill," Nunberg says.

The spelling bee became wildly popular in the 1840s in the USA and the United Kingdom, he says. "In Philadelphia, there were fights breaking out over the correct spelling of words," Nunberg says. He says soon the spelling bee became a staple in schools.

"It's a weird ritual. The only literate activity you can conduct in the dark. Turn the lights off and you can have a spelling bee," Nunberg says. "It's merely the ability to know and recite these rules."

Spell on America.

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