Spell Check: The Birthday Edition

A long time ago, my brother worked at the local cable station.  It was pretty much his dream job, and I know that because he used to (and still does) volunteer there.  Anyway, one of the things that he used to work on was the Community Channel.  If you lived in St. Stephen, you know the channel I'm talking about.  If you didn't, it was basically text on a screen that would let everyone know what was going on in the neighbourhood.  It was insanely low budget, and the fact that it was done with a computer and not with a guy writing it on a flip chart was amazing unto itself.  

Anyway, whenever the community channel would get updated, my mother would watch it.  The whole thing.  And she would write down all of errors in grammar and spelling and give my brother a full report.  It became kind of a thing that when the Community Channel would get updated, the cable station could expect at least one call.

For everyone that is still reading and hasn't been bored to tears by my description of a long dead channel that nobody watched in the first place, I would like to point out that my mother also reads my blog.

Here is a copy of an email that I received.

    As one of your greatest fans, I really must ask what a "dirth" is?!!!  Is this a new millenium word that only appears in very modern dictionaries? 

    Apparently my computer hasn't heard of it either.  If I try to use it, Spellcheck complains. 

    Yahoo tells me that "dirth" an imaginary word used by ignorant girls...and you are definitely not a girl, notwithstanding the fact that you NEVER got the dollhouse you wanted when you were seven...or was it ten?

    Did you mean "dearth"...no, that wouldn't fit the context...maybe "wealth of amusing stories"?

    I await enlightenment!

Love, Mom

Nuts.

The post that Mom is referring to is this one regarding The 36th Annual Pizza and a Movie Day.  It is in the second paragraph, it is obvious, it is incorrect, and I am ashamed.

Here's what happened.

Do you remember how back in school when they are teaching how to write essays they always made us turn in our rough drafts along with the final version?  I think it was supposed to instil the proper method for writing papers, but it just made me crazzy (notice the two z's?  That's really crazy).  From a very early age, I have never been good with rough drafts.  I've gotten better, but I'm still not that great with editing sometimes, and when it comes to my posts... well, you're reading the rough, first, and final drafts.

Hence this "dirth".

There is no such word, as my mother has so gently explained.  I meant to say "dearth".  Which means entirely the opposite of how I used it.  What happened was I changed the tone of my post from one of a barren landscape to something a little more upbeat.  What I didn't do was remove the word that I had misspelled.  So now it's misspelled and incorrectly used, 0 for 2.  It may be that the whole "first draft" thing may have had something to it.

I have decided to leave the post as it is, without editing it, so that my children will learn from my mistakes.

Also, two embarrassing confessions come out of this email:  I did want a doll house when I was a kid (that my sister got for Christmas the year that I didn't ask for it, and that I have never let my family forget about), and my mother uses Yahoo.

You can decide which is the most embarrassing.