Her spelling crisis might seem a tad geeky
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I've been a professional copy editor since the first Bush administration, so this doesn't happen to me very often.
I was writing an e-mail the other day and I realized there was something I didn't know how to spell.
For a professional copy editor, this amounts to a full-blown midlife crisis.
I weighed my options. Should I go out and buy a sports car, get a tattoo or ruin some poor college boy?
I probably won't get back to you on that. In the meantime, ponder this: Which of these seems geekier to a reader who doesn't remember the first Bush administration?
a) Caring about spelling in an e-mail.
b) Caring about spelling.
c) Using e-mail.
This is actually a trick question; no one too young to remember the first Bush administration is reading this, because it's more than 140 characters long.
The word I didn't know how to spell, having never seen it written, was "skosh," which is spelled "skosh." I always thought of it as vaguely Midwestern, as in the sentence, "Oh jeez, have a skosh more egg salad." But it turns out to be Japanese, as in the sentence, "Let's do a skosh more karaoke before we say sayonara."
The good folks at Merriam-Webster explain that "skosh" is from the Japanese word "sukoshi" (pronounced "skoh shee"), meaning "a smidgen."
That's another one I had to check the spelling of, because there are several plausible ways to spell it. Smidgen is preferred, but smidgin and smidgeon are also acknowledged. I guess smidgin English is just a phrase or two, and a smidgeon is a very small urban bird. To avoid spelling confusion -- if that hasn't gone the way of quaint afflictions like chilblains and dropsy -- you can always go right to "smidge," which is apparently closer to the original English-dialect word from which "smidgen" is derived: "smitch," meaning "smudge."
The heroically named Internet Accuracy Project (accuracyproject.org) defines a smidgen as half a pinch (One finger? No, wait, that's a liquid measurement) or 1/32 of a teaspoon. There are commercially produced measuring spoons in dash, pinch and smidgen denominations. You can buy them. If that makes any kind of sense to you.
I don't see why those would be necessary if you have even a modicum of culinary confidence -- however much that is. How many dashes in a modicum?
Modicum comes from Latin, so maybe it's more appropriate to ask which is bigger: a modicum or a scintilla? "Scintilla" is Latin for "spark." It's kind of a beautiful word, isn't it? Scintilla. It sounds like a delicate sea creature, or a wicked Roman empress.
If you had very small twin girls, you could name them Scintilla and Iota. Iota is the ninth and smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, rarely invited to fraternity parties and not much bigger than an apostrophe. (Apostrophe: a Greek fertility deity, goddess of contractions.)
If Scintilla and Iota have a brother, he would of course be Tad. Tad is a name that has to be applied carefully, with your last name taken into account. You wouldn't want your boy to be Tad Gross or Tad Frilli.
At least "tad" is easy to spell. Maybe that's a small point, but copy editors are paid to overthink these tiny distinctions.
Just a skosh.
First Published January 5, 2011 12:00 am
