"UPPERCASE/lowercase"

So there I was, attending the prestigious Bronx High School Of Science, and boy was I in over my head. First of all, kids who were all smarter then I was, were all over the place, and for a bonus, they were all interested in achieving, and they studied all the time. I viewed studying as something for girls, and for non-athletic boys. I didn't study, and spent most of my non-school hours in a poolroom, or playing some kind of ball. I had a girlfriend, who was really a friend, and I was very occupied and enthralled by her. Hormones were racing about, and I had no real understanding of them at that time, and come to think about it, I'm not much better at that now, except the hormone level is way, way down. It was certainly a distraction.

Math was good, history bad. Chemistry was good, French was bad. Physics was good; English was bad, very bad. So who cares what's an adverb, a noun etc. Certainly not me.

I was barely surviving when I came upon my sophomore English. Teacher. A nice lady as I recall, who said "Norman, you will spend the rest of your life in my class until you learn to use correct grammar, and understand it, and learn to spell". She would not listen to me when I told her that I would have a secretary to do that stuff. Of course she was right, and for one of the not to few times in my life, I was wrong. I never did learn to spell, nor did I learn grammar. I circumvented the system by transferring to a private high school, where no one seemed to care if I could spell or not.

So why am I writing this confessional now I ask myself? I had spent most of my adult life not writing letters for two reasons. First, my left handed handwriting could be used by the military as a sort of code system, in that even I cant read what I've written. Second, of course, is my spelling. It' not that there are a few words that I can't spell, but rather a few words that I can spell. So there, now I have admitted it to the world, and I feel better.

Now of course, what has changed my life? I'd bet you know the answer, Spell Check.

There is the invention of the wheel, that was great, the internal combustion engine, great as well. Of course there was the thermos bottle, not bad. But perhaps the greatest of them all for me was Spell Check, which has changed my life.

Next in line for me of course is the computer, which doesn't recognize bad handwriting like mine. And has all kind of Spell Check things. Wow, what a change for me. People will no longer be able to find out about my handwriting or spelling, and with Microsoft Word I can and do write all kinds of stuff. Perhaps good for me, and perhaps bad for those people that I bombard with stuff that I write like this.

I was dong a guest lecture a couple of months ago at USC and complained that their blackboard was inferior in that it didn't have Spell Check. I had double trouble in that my handwriting is still awful.

Several years ago, I started to write my own emails, but I expect that because of my own insecurity, I only used lower case, so it looked like casual stuff. It then would take Spell Check forever to go through all my non-capitalized words.

This week I have decided to do proper emails, and recognize, at last the previously unused shift key, and use capital letters. I do wish that I would have an opportunity to tell my Bronx Science English teacher how amazingly stupid I was, and that she was right, and I sadly was wrong. Having said this, I know that she knew that all along.

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