LEND ME YOUR EAR: LET'S GIVE SPELLING ITS JUST DESERTS

One morning early, I switched the button on the small TV at the foot of my bed, and IRRESISTABLE hit me smack in the eyeballs. The correct spelling is IRRESISTIBLE.

Poor spellers contend that if you recognize the word, that's all that matters. Well, I just read in Speak Out that someone "hardly disagreed" with a proposal to increase taxes. I didn't have to read very far to realize the individual "heartily disagreed" with the idea. Hardly means scarcely, heartily means in a hearty manner, with good will.

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, I came across limpid, and to judge by the rest of the sentence I couldn't tell which of three spellings was intended. Limpid can mean one who clings persistently; lumped, used as an adjective, means lacking strength or firmness.

A short while back, on a special about gourmet cooking, I saw coleslaw spelled cold slaw. In a TV medical report, I've seen larynx written larnyx, and in another, perspiration came out prespiration. Both terms were mispronounced by the "experts." More than once, we've seen marital written martial. The two words may have a lot in common, but spelling doesn't qualify for inclusion.

Also on TV, an illustrated art lecture gave us college for collage. A college is (alleged to be) an institution of learning; a collage is an artistic composition of materials and/or objects pasted over a surface. On the same special, the screenwriter gave us lime for limn. Lime is a fruit, a tree, or a form of calcium oxide spread on twigs to catch birds. The word required was limn, a verb used to depict or describe by painting or drawing.

From an unidentified reader comes a newsletter naming a new "charperson" to head a committee. No doubt this was unintentional, but "charperson" amused me because I'm opposed to chairperson for chairman, and I felt the demotion from chair to char was good enough for whoever substitutes person for man or woman. I use chairman for both: chair is accepted but strikes me as inanimate.

In a review of Alyn Ayckbourne's play Absent Friends, William A. Henry wrote (or didn't write)..."a man rattles on about his drowned fiance to old friends who never met her." This had to be a misprint, for William A. Henry would never have confused fiance with fiancee.

Perhaps suffering a similar fate, Richard Small, in an article from AP about the effect of smoke from burning refineries and oil wells, was quoted as follows: "Smoke released by fires will not increase global warming by adding to the greenhose effect." No blue-stocking advocate would accept green hose excepting as a fun gift to wear on St. Patrick's Day, so my vote went to greenhouse effect.

My private library includes more than one book introduced by a FORWARD. Forward is an adverb denoting direction, an adjective describing one who is pushy (or worse), a verb as in forwarding a letter, or a noun such as a forward in sports. But the preface or introductory note at the front of a book is a FOREWORD, with no alternate spelling.

A friend of mine, recently honored, reports a note from someone who was happy she was to receive her "just desserts." My friend still wonders whether "just desserts" referred to ice cream and cake, or to the deserved recognition. If the latter, "just deserts" was the required spelling. Never mind that the pronunciation is confusing. That's the way it is.

Dr. Joseph Miller of Moorehouse, Minn., has sent a coupon for an omelette and waffle breakfast at a place called Eats Cetera. Haven't we had enough trouble trying to teach ET cetera, without this misguided effort to be clever?

Only last week, we learned that the Aussies have a deadly new weapon frozen (or was it fried?) kangaroo tails. Frozen or fried to a crisp, the whiplike tails will surely inspire a children's story called The Tale of the Kangaroo or perhaps The Tail of the Kangaroo. This is one instance that allows us to spell the word either way and still give spelling its just deserts.