Thursday, April 13, 2006

You Say To-may-to

Ever notice how you can get hung up on something really stupid? How it grows and grows until nothing else seems to matter?

I have that problem. See... Camilla wears cotton fabric shirts a lot. These are commonly known as t-shirts.

Or is it T-shirts?

Or maybe tee shirts?

I was just working on editing again, and came across that word. One of the ladies in my crit group mentioned once that my spelling (t-shirt) should have been T (with a capital or is it capitol?) - shirt.

I couldn't seem to remember that (and I'm pretty sure she's right -- or is it write?) and so decided to use the spelling "tee shirt". But now, that's annoying me. Plus, I have to remember to remain consistent and not use T-shirt part of the time and tee shirt the rest (wrest?).

I think it's having that capital/capitol letter in the middle of the sentence that annoys me about the first spelling.

So there you have it -- one of the problems that keep me up at night and wile (while? whyle? wial?) away hours of my editing time.

On a side note -- as many of you know, I homeschool my daughter. I highly recommend this to anyone partly because I'm learning so much (LOL). I'm also realizing how truly stupid our language is. "This sound is spelled like this. Unless it's spelled like this. And sometimes, without any reason whatsoever, it's spelled like this. And you just have to remember which (witch?) goes where because there is no rule about it."

Why oh Y do I put myself through this?

3 comments:

Judy said...

Good morning. According to the Mirriam Webster online dictionary, it's a capital "T"... that said, you can google t-shirt and find it both capitalized or not. If you google "tee shirt"... you will also normally get t-shirt or T-shirt. You will NOT find "tee shirt." However, I think you can spell it the way you want and when it's accepted the editor will tell you how he wants it and that will be that ;-)

Ceri Hebert said...

My big hang up is with names. I can't write until my characters have names that fit them. Place names are even worse. If my setting is a ficticious then I have to make sure there's no other town by the same name in the state etc. Its a pain.

my spam protection code is bnpasjai
I guess they're running out of shorter combos.

MJFredrick said...

We just started a program at school this year that is really strong on phonics. You'd be surprised how many of the teachers don't know phonics, and why words are spelled the way they are. I don't know how I know, but they're always coming to me to ask.

But yeah, it's hard to explain to kids why "they" isn't spelled "thay," and stuff like that.