OCD & 15 Famous Thinkers Who Couldn't Spell

Dyslexia is basically a learning disability that impairs an individual’s ability to interpret what they hear into how they write. It can affect one’s reading, spelling, and rapid visual-verbal responding. It is not an intellectual disability and has nothing to do with intelligence. Some people have a very mild form, like mixing up the letters b and d or failing to write symbols correctly, as in backwards question marks etc. Others with severe forms fail to achieve basic language skills, and cannot read or write without great difficulty. It is usually diagnosed in childhood and persists throughout life. It often goes undetected and misdiagnosed. It has been found to be hereditary. Dyslexia can co-exist with OCD, and can add to the general frustration and despair that OCD can cause.

I recently received an e-mail from Rosa  Ray, who works with  http://www/Onlinecollegecourses.com. Rosa sent me this very interesting article, "15 Famous thinkers Who Couldn’t Spell." It got me thinking that perhaps these extremely intelligent people, the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, John Keats, Alfred Mosher Butts – ironically the inventor of Scrabble, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austin, John F. Kennedy, may have had Dyslexia…

“Words can be tricky things, often spelled quite differently than how they sound, coming from foreign languages with different sets of rules, or being just plain weird. It's no wonder then that so many people struggle with spelling, even those who are generally regarded as having some seriously brilliant minds. No, it's not just grade-schoolers, college students, and the everyday man who struggles with the age old "i before e" dilemma, but also scientists, writers, and world leaders. Here, you'll find a list of great thinkers who made great strides in their respective fields, but never could quite conquer the perils of spelling.

15 Famous Thinkers Who Couldn’t Spell

January 24th, 2012 by Staff Writers

Words can be tricky things, often spelled quite differently than how they sound, coming from foreign languages with different sets of rules, or being just plain weird. It's no wonder then that so many people struggle with spelling, even those who are generally regarded as having some seriously brilliant minds. No, it's not just grade-schoolers, college students, and the everyday man who struggles with the age old "i before e" dilemma, but also scientists, writers, and world leaders. Here, you'll find a list of great thinkers who made great strides in their respective fields, but never could quite conquer the perils of spelling.

1                                                                                     Alfred Mosher Butts

                                                                                               

Unfamiliar with this name? Well, you're probably familiar with what he created, though it might surprise you to learn that Butts was a bad speller. He created the iconic and still quite popular game Scrabble, which requires one to be adept at spelling. The inventor himself was admittedly not the best speller, often scoring only 300 points on average in a game of Scrabble.

2                                                                                     

                                  William Faulkner

Faulkner wasn't a truly terrible speller, but if you take a look at his original manuscripts there are some definite errors the iconic Southern author wouldn't have wanted to see in print. Despite setting many of his famous books and short stories in the difficult to spell and pronounce Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner's editors confirm that despite their repeated attempts to point out his mistakes, he made spelling errors all through his career.

3                                       F. Scott Fitzgerald

                                                                                                         

Few writers are so known for their bad spelling as Fitzgerald. How bad, you say? Fitzgerald wasn't even able to spell the name of one of his closest friends, Hemingway, often misaddressing him in correspondence and papers as "Earnest Hemminway." The editor of his collected letters called him a "lamentable speller" who struggled with words like "definite" and "criticism." Still, his poor spelling didn't seem to do the author any harm, and many of his works are regarded as literary masterpieces today.

                                                  Ernest Hemingway

                                                                                                         

Ernest Hemingway may not have had much room to judge when it came to his friend Fitzgerald not spelling his name correctly. Long before the days of spell check, Hemingway had to rely on newspaper and book editors to catch his mistakes, a job which they often complained would be a lot easier if he would make an effort to spell things correctly (though Hemingway retorted that that's what they were being paid to do).

                                                             John Keats

                                                                                                                          

The brilliant Keats died quite young at only 26, so one can hardly blame him for not spending time worrying about spelling in his written works. If readers want to get a taste of his more interesting spelling choices, they only need turn to his letters. They record many odd spelling choices, including the misspelling of purple as "purplue" in a letter to his love Fanny Brawne, a misspelling which she questioned and Keats tried to cover up by saying he was creating a new combination of purple and blue.

                                               Jane Austin

                                                                                                                   

Jane Austen may have a place among the literary elites today, but when it came to spelling and grammar she wasn't too handy with either. Research into her personal letters and manuscripts has exposed numerous errors in spelling and grammar that were corrected later by her early editor, William Gifford. One of her favorite misspellings? She often spelled "scissors" as "scissars."

                                                                                                     Fannie Flagg

                                                                                                                   

Actress and author Fannie Flagg has had great success in her literary career, most notably with the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe which was later adapted into a highly successful film. Yet writing never came easy to Flagg, who has dyslexia. She has said she was challenged as a writer because she was "severely dyslexic and couldn't spell, still can't spell. So I was discouraged from writing and embarrassed." Flagg obviously overcame her embarrassment, and has since written numerous books and screenplays.

                                                                                                           Albert Einstein        

                                                                                                                

Being bilingual, one could hardly blame Einstein for being a bad speller in English. Yet it wasn't just in English that Einstein struggled. He also was a pretty bad speller in his native German, and got even worse when he began using English more regularly. Of course, Einstein didn't make those same errors when it came to writing mathematical equations, a fact that helped to make his name synonymous with genius today.

                                                                                 Winston Churchill         

                                                                                                   

While today Churchill may be regarded as a great leader and speaker, he had a rough start in his schooling, always struggling with spelling and writing. He was a notoriously bad speller throughout his life, but he never let it hold him back. He battled through his difficulties, which also included a speech impediment, to leave his mark on the world.

1                                      Leonardo Da Vinci

                                        

Leonardo helped define the term "Renaissance man," excelling in both the arts and the sciences, but spelling may not have been his forte. He is quoted as having once said, "You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills." Some historians believe he may have been dyslexic (there is no way to prove that, of course) as his journals and writings are riddled with spelling errors common with dyslexics.

                                         Agatha Christie

                                                                                                     

Agatha Christie penned some of the bestselling books ever created, but the author admitted once, "I, myself, was always recognized … as the "slow one" in the family. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. I was … an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this day." Despite her struggles with spelling, Christie was an enormously successful writer, and has gone down in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling novelist of all time.

                                        John F. Kennedy

                                        

JFK is a figure that has fascinated the American public for decades, but what many may not know is just how bad of a speller the famous president was. He was outed for his poor spelling by his wife, Jackie, though she was a French literature major in college and would later become a book editor, so she may have been a pretty harsh critic.

1                                         W.B. Yeats

                                            

Yeats is yet another famous author who, while quite adept at writing, was pretty terrible when it came to spelling. To see examples of his spelling errors, one need only find a copy of his collected letters which contain misspellings like "feal" for "feel" and "sleap" for "sleep". Despite his inadequacy when it came to spelling, Yeats was a prolific and very successful writer, winning a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

1                                          John Irving

                                         

John Irving is another author on this list whose poor spelling was the result of dyslexia. Sadly, Irving wasn't recognized as having dyslexia until much later in his life, stating, "The diagnosis of dyslexia wasn't available in the late fifties — bad spelling like mine was considered a psychological problem by the language therapist who evaluated my mysterious case. When the repeated courses of language therapy were judged to have had no discernible influence on me, I was turned over to the school psychiatrist." Irving's struggles with spelling affected him deeply, and he even reflects on them in one of his most famous novels, The World According to Garp, stating that English is such a mishmash of different languages that no one should ever feel stupid for being a bad speller.

                                    Benjamin Franklin     

                                                                                         

Ben Franklin wasn't a particularly good speller in his time, and actually felt that the alphabet as it stood (and still does today) was what was holding so many back from being able to spell. In a letter he once wrote, "You need not be concerned in writing to me about your bad spelling, for in my opinion as our alphabet now stands the bad spelling, or what is called so, is generally best, as conforming to the sound of the letters and of the words." Whether you struggle with spelling or not, you have to admit he has a point, as many words are spelled quite differently than they sound."

http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2012/01/24/15-famous-thinkers-who-couldnt-spell/

Searching around the Internet, I came across this article, which may help if you have Dyslexia and want to do something about it…

"Dyslexia, Bad Spelling and Intelligence

Posted by admin in dyslexia-assistive-technology

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I remember once studying with a non-native American who came to the US as a teenager. Though his English accent was perfect, when speaking he had quite a lot of grammar errors. I remember that whenever he was unsure of his grammar, he used to apologize, and quietly explain that he was a non-native American. When I asked him how come he keeps on repeating the fact that he is a non-native American, he answered that he would rather people know that he is a non-native American, then have people think that he was an uneducated or unintelligent person, resulting in poor grammar.

I recently read in a blog a suggestion for people with dyslexia or dysgraphia to add to their email signature the fact that the email writer has dyslexia. This in order to explain why there are so many spelling mistakes in the email…

As a dyslexic and terrible speller, this got me thinking, WHAT IS PREFERABLE?

• For the mail recipient to potentially conclude that the email writer (“me”) is not very intelligent. FACT OF LIFE: Some people will conclude that a person with poor grammar, poor spelling, poor vocabulary (let’s remember that many times the written vocabulary of a dyslexic may be quite poor, because a person with dyslexia tries to write only the vocabulary that he has some confidence that he can spell correctly)… is simply not very educated or else not very intelligent.

• For the mail recipient to have the knowledge and understanding that the email writer is dyslexic. FACT OF LIFE: Some people, mainly those ignorant of what dyslexia is all about, may associate dyslexia to a severe disability that the writer is suffering from.

So what do you think is preferable?

For me, after sending thousands of horribly spelled emails in my life, I came to the conclusion that both options listed above are bad- a classic “lose-lose” scenario. A person with dyslexia must make the effort to spell correctly. Advanced writing assistive solutions, such as Ghotit, empower a person with dyslexia to produce correctly spelled text, removing from the table this whole “is it preferable to be tagged as a Dyslexic vs Unintelligent person” issue…"

http://www.ghotit.com/2010/09/dyslexia-bad-spelling/

To all those who have Dyslexia – take heart, there are now resources for you – and you are in very good company!