word nerds

This morning I was chatting with my mom on the phone, our usual Thursday morning check-in (my daughter spends Wednesday nights with her and I like to know what they were up to and how the morning went). She mentioned J's homework assignment, which was to write as many words as she could think of about Fall, and that led us to a previous assignment, completed with her grandfather, which was to think of as many words as she could think of that rhymed with "school." One of the words on her list was "minuscule," and my mom said she asked Bompa whether he'd spelled it right and he replied defensively "Yes!" To which I replied, How is it spelled? because I spelled it in my head and couldn't figure out where the misspell might come in. And she said minUscule, related to "minus," which most people spell minIscule. And I wrote down both words and had to confess that, unlike most words that are commonly misspelled, I couldn't tell the difference with my naked eye. Quite embarrassing for an obsessively corrective speller such as myself. But then I said, Well now I will remember it forever, just like "testament," which I misspelled testEment in fifth grade (or maybe sixth) to get myself eliminated from the spelling bee. And I suppose that is a testament (ha ha) to my spelling obsession, the fact that I have remembered this for 25 years, and then my mom goes, "mine was 'murder.' MurdUr. Third grade." And this was 50 years ago, so I see that I come by my spelling obsession quite honestly.