I’ve just had a novel experience.
The percentage of human communication that takes place in the form of text is greater today than at any point in human history. Inarguably, a Fourteen year old living in the English speaking world today has written more words than the majority of people did in a lifetime three generations before them.
There are adults alive today who have always had the help of a jagged red line that would appear beneath their written voice to inform them that they’ve spelled something incorrectly.
Sadly, I am not someone so lucky.
When I’m planning to type a word that I expect I will fail to spell (usually some species’ taxonomic name or some culinary term from a language I’m unfamiliar with) I usually give myself the space to attempt the spelling and confirm my failure.
Upon failure, I tend to copy my attempt to spell the word in question and perform an internet search for it, basking in my good fortune to live in a time in which search engines have developed the skills to discern what the apes that ask them questions have clumsily attempted to articulate.
I’ve just made the rare and happy discovery that I can spell a word from memory that spellcheck seems to be unaware of.
“Chikungunya.” No idea how I learned to proficiently spell chikungunya. But I can.