This Week’s Words

Tomorrow?

This has probably never happened to you.

It was the late 60s.  I was a freshman English major in college.  My department chairman asked me to put a note on the chalkboard in his afternoon classroom saying that the class was cancelled for that day and that something (I forget what) would take place “tomorrow.”

On this most important mission, I went to the classroom, picked up a piece of chalk, and started to write the message . . . until I got to the word “tomorrow.”  I couldn’t remember if it had two M’s or two R’s (no combination of M’s or R’s looked right.)

I was stuck.  It would be decades before I could “just Google it”; the students would be arriving in ten minutes; and where “tomorrow” should lead to the rest of the sentence was a blank slate (which, in the days of chalkboards was quite literal).

While I intensely remember the Purgatory of not remembering how to spell “tomorrow,” I don’t remember how I solved the dilemma.  Surely, I didn’t just “take a guess” (risking the ridicule of the arriving students), but I don’t remember asking anyone how to spell it either.

This has happened to me on more than one occasion.  I’ll be about to write/print/type a most ordinary word—one that I have successfully spelled 59,754 times—and no combination of letters looks right.  When this happens now, of course, I do “just Google it.”  If I enter the search term correctly, the search results will reward me with a definition.  If I misspell the word in the search engine, Google will kindly, tactfully tell me, “Showing results for [correct spelling of the word].”

Either way, I’ve got the correct spelling of the word without risking public disgrace.  Unless a future corporation, government, or bored IT person mines past word searches for less-than-successful attempts.  I’ve heard that nothing on the Internet ever disappears.  That probably includes disgrace.