Dear LBT friends...please humor an old English major and use the Spell Check feature when you post. It takes away from what you are trying to share if you can't take the time to correct your spelling. Sometimes a misspelled word completely changes a post's meaning and it can be darned confusing, too.

Here's what the icon looks like. It's located at the top of the posting window.

Thank you, from the bottom of my OCD little heart.

Thank you Carlene- It bugs me too. I noticed my posts are the only ones "edited reason: spelling".

I never knew we had spell check available in our posts! Sweet! I will definatley take advantage of it. Thanks Carlene!

Whoops! Tried to use it because it requires a download... I'm at work and can't do it. Hopefully my posts aren't too terrible!

Where is the spell check?!?!

Where is the spell check?!?!

Upper right hand corner of the gray box where you type your post. It is a little checkmark with "ABC" above it.

Do you see it now? If not, let me know.

Tank you for the spell check info.

I mean "Thank You"

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And we think English is easy?????

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is "UP."

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. [font=Comic Sans MS]We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special. And this UP is confusing:

A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP , look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions .

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't giveUP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it wets UP the earth.

When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so.............

Time to shut UP! .....!

Oh...one more thing:

What is the first thing you do in the morning & the last thing you do at night?

U P[/font]

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I'm probably the odd one out, but I love spelling mistakes, typos, slang, crazy typing, people who write big, small, caps, break the rules, do things different. I like seeing peoples personality in their writing. It's like beat poetry. It's like an accent, or an affectation. It's... human. I love diversity. I'm from the linguistics over English grammar school of thought. When I studied linguistics in University and discovered linguists with their PhDs studied pigeon, slang, patois and other language variant forms with passion and acceptance, and as part of the constant evolution and revolution of language - I was in heaven. The correct spellings and proper English of today was once the common spelling mistakes and slang of the past! The common spelling mistakes and slang of today will probably be the proper English of the future! If you are grammar and spelling challenged... fear not, just adjust your thinking - maybe your just ahead of your times, and a pioneer in the language of tommorow. Not everyone reads your posts and cringes, some of us smile, some of us see your personality, or influences from what part of the world you're from, some of us delight in the perfection of imperfection, and the courage not to constantly edit, but let your mistakes just be. Weird, maybe. They never could cure me of my run on sentences.

And in the South, we put things UP when we are finished with them!

Leila... WHEW! I was thinking... wow... I love it when people use slang... make typos and otherwise add personality to their posts! I'm reading posts because I care what people say... not that it is said correctly. I sent my Mom a letter at age 18... she sent my original letter back CORRECTED along with her reply. I never... ever... ever... sent her another letter. I couldn't get over the fear that I would make a mistake. Now... I may have to print your post and mail it to my mother.

My husband is not a native Engish speaker, he learned it as a 2nd language via 10 years of King's English. Some of our words, like "up", really REALLY confuse him. One he has a lot of trouble with is "already", which he takes to mean "happened at least once before". I already read that book, so I have read it at least once... already. But when we're visiting my parents, and my mother tells him, "Hurry up already" he cannot figure out what she means... how can it be already when we haven't gone there before?

Side note, he also has a problem with plurals. He doesn't always grasp that a word not ending in "s" can represent a plural state, e.g. "people". To him it's logical to say "people are" because "people" is a singular word (no "s"), but refers to more than one person, and plurals get "are".

He is usually guilty of catachresis (or maybe it's catharsis... ha ha) in some form or another.

Metaphors, idioms, etc. confuse the heck out of him, and he'll often recite them incorrectly. That's like the toaster calling the oven black!

His English is quite good, and most people assume he's "American" unless it comes up in conversation, or they try to pronounce our last name! But sometimes his pronunciation gives him away. He confuses letter cobminations because the same ones in his language are pronounced very differently in ours. One example is "ch" which in his language is pronouced "sh", which "sh" is pronounced "ch", so you sit on a "shuh"-air, while you listen to "Chuh"er sing, eat something made by a "chuh"-ef. And if he comes across a word that he has not heard before, he guesses... and often misses... the Cheverolet cavalier (cuh-vAl-yer) or Cologate toothpaste (coe-loe-got-ay), or even a comb (which becomes "cawmb", with the same "aw" as in "lawn").

And I love every minute of it.

And I didn't use spellcheck either, obviously!

Leila - you bring up a good point. I have an English degree (literature), but had to take several linguistics classes... history of the English language, the evolution of language, etc. At the time ebonics was brought up as a frequent example for discussion... is it GOOD because a group of people have collectively formed their own language variant, or is it BAD because it "butchers" an internationally recognized language foundation and makes "lazy English" okay in insitutions.

That's just one very small example.

Not everyone reads your posts and cringes, some of us smile, some of us see your personality, or influences from what part of the world you're from, some of us delight in the perfection of imperfection, and the courage not to constantly edit, but let your mistakes just be. Weird, maybe. They never could cure me of my run on sentences.

i definitally have the run-on-and-ons and being from the south i say fixen to and taters and when i am being silly i say fridgidater (one of my friends redneck grannies used to say that one) and i type that i am fixen to workout. i know that its not proper but thats just how i talk. i am not concerned with being proper!

for my job things have to be proofed and proofed again for grammatical, punctuation and upper lower case and thats enough for me! i am sorry but i dont care if someone cant spell or if they just cant type! in personal emails and message board activity i dont do upper lower case. its all lower and i dont do ' for words like don't- it's time consuming and i am just trying to get my thoughts out quick before i lose them!

i am sorry for all past and future misspelled and grammatically incorrect posts! there...now i am set for life!

Wheetsin - Neither of my parents has English as a first language, my father is a Danish Canadian, and my mother French Canadian. They also both learned to speak English by mutual German friends. So they have an interesting accent. I grew up with people from all different language backgrounds around me, friends of the family from all over the world. Growing up we also belonged to the Canadian-Chinese friendship association.

Anyways, funny story, we had family friends who owned a cabin at what we were always told was 'Turd Lake' to our ears as kids. The people who owned it had accents, as did my parents, everyone said 'Turd Lake'. One day they put a framed map of the general area up, so we decided to locate where we are on the lap, us kids sat around and looked and looked... There was a First Lake on the map, a Second Lake on the map.... and, a THIRD LAKE on the map. None of the adults pronounced TH, all the accents made TH's hard T's. When we figured it out we were rolling on the ground laughing, we had been telling friends for summers that we had been vacationing at Turd Lake, alas it was mundanely just Third Lake.

Michelle, apology accepted, cause I'm rite thar with u. I'll prob never be able to type another "real" letter, without using spell ck, due to LBT and email, it seems pointless.

Sorry perfctnst out thar if I make ya cringe, but that's just me, what ya see is what u get.