Deliberite Mispellings

Our Editor-in-Chief asked whether we should allow deliberate misspellings as defined words in the OEDILF, a debate which harked back to early discussions around such non-words as alot and apop. In the early years of the site, a limerick on the latter was reassigned as pop, a and bottom-drawered as being out-of-range, but a few limericks on the former were let into the database under lot, a with alot—a common misspelling—as a secondary defined word.

Revisiting those verses years later, I became uneasy with the only reason for including the misspelling as a secondary defined word being to keep them in-range, and thought that they should really be bottom-drawered, even after they had spent a decade in the main database. Given the extent of the debate around them before, though, I talked myself into (and proposed) a compromise position of making them an exception to the rule, with the inclusion of the non-word defined word alot as being the same as a placeholder entry in a paper dictionary (“alot: see lot, a”), put there to catch people looking under the a’s for it.

I was still uneasy about opening the floodgates, however, and left a comment for any new writers looking at those workshops to see whether they should write on alot: “Please, no more. We’ve already discussed it alot, erm, a lot.”

Our later discussion around misspellings didn’t concern bottom-drawering, but that idea of using misspelled defined words as placeholders to catch readers searching for them, to justify including geneology as a secondary defined word under the correctly spelled genealogy. The floodgates were, if not fully open, unlatched and being pulled hard.

This created an ideal opportunity to see if I could fit entire lists of commonly misspelled words into my response....

Apparantly, beleive it or not, mispellings are underated. Every seperate mispelling (and presumably pronounciation), no matter how wierd, is now allowable as a defined word. What a privelege! We all have lisence to define collections of letters as we please, wich it had never occured to me to try, but then the recieved wisdom is so often wrong... this is the kind of can-do, entreprenurial spirit we haven’t seen since the days of the pharoahs. So if you have a tendancy to mispell, wether or not it drives your collegues crazy, we can accomodate you—at least untill the goverment publically announces otherwise.

But seriously... is this neccessary? In my experiance, it’s hard enough to aquire all the relevent skills needed to write a successfull limerick without moving these goalposts. The fact that we’re consciencious about spelling has proven indispensible in this pasttime. On occassion, we might have seen other dictionaries that have refered to misspellings, but they haven’t had to write and workshop entire limericks about them. If we do this, then we’ll be workshopping mispellings around the calender, acting as liasion between authors and our Editor-in-Chief for his guidence about what is or isn’t ok. In a business, that would have lead to half the staff being layed off.

For the maintainance of our sanity, I don’t recomend we do this, and hope that will be the concensus. Let’s withold our approval.

(It wasn’t easy working all of those into a single comment. I couldn’t face including all of Wikipedia’s commonly misspelled English words.)

In the case of geneology, dropping the misspelling as a defined word and unbolding it (which was the eventual decision) leaves a perfectly good verse on the properly-spelled genealogy—one for which the theme is its common misspelling. If our concern is people finding misspellings, a search will still bring them up; they’ll get suggested near misses, which lead to the correct spellings right away:

No matching limericks found for apparrent. Would you like to try: aperient apparent aproned

And if they search for a misspelling “Used in our dictionary”, they’ll find every verse or Author’s Note that uses it.

You wouldn’t want to go to this well often; imagine workshopping separate limericks highlighting every common misspelling, let alone every possible one. It’s a relief that letting through our early alot cases hasn’t led to a string of limericks all about the misspellings accomodate, acommodate, aparent, aparrent, apparant, apparrent, aquire, beleive, belive, calender, coleague, collaegue, collegue, concensus, consciencious, definately, entrepeneur, entrepenur, entreperneur, entreprenur, experiance, and goverment, rather than limericks about the concepts themselves. Only three alot limericks were approved back in the day, but because of their potential to mislead by example it seems clear now that removing alot as a defined word from all three would be wise.

Beleive it or not, a mispelling
Can make any limerick compelling.
Is it neccessary? No,
But allow me to show
By example. (My editor’s yelling...)

No matter how wierd or perverse,
A mispelling is far from a curse.
Consciencious objection
To words’ imperfection
Is daft; we accomodate worse.

There’s apparrently definately ample
To choose from—recieve, for example,
Is one that occured
To wich collegues refered
As a word we have lisense to trample.

Lets find more of these wrongs to define!
Tpyos too, if you should so incline.
On occassion, it hurts,
So let’s do them in spurts.
I’ll read yours if you let me write mine.

(There’s a whole Wikipedia page on satiric misspelling. I wish I could go in and change the title to “Satiric Mispelling”, but I know that some party-pooper would revert it immediately.)

Reworked from forum comments from February 2023.