Oh, I wasn't meaning to pick on you, specifically. It's just one of those words that I commonly see, as you put it, excellent spellers frequently messing up on. I'd love to do (or at least read) a study as to why certain words get misspelled more than others.
There was a piece in Pravda West (St. Pete Times) about it being the most misspelled word. Can't remember what #2 was.
Oh, I wasn't meaning to pick on you, specifically. It's just one of those words that I commonly see, as you put it, excellent spellers frequently messing up on. I'd love to do (or at least read) a study as to why certain words get misspelled more than others.
I think with that particular word, it has become so common these days to see it spelled with an "a" that it's starting to look like the correct spelling. It's one of those words you look at and say to yourself "Is that right? That's not right, is it? D@mn, I better go to dictionary.com and make sure."
Shouldn't the question be "Why can no one spell anymore?"
Because good spelling comes from recognition & most of the reading people do nowadays is off forums just like this where there are plenty of mistakes instead of books that have been proofread.
I'm an excellent speller, a pretty decent typist, and not bad at all with grammar and punctuation.
But I sure screwed up that one, didn't I?
Didn't notice it when I typed it, then reading through the posts I saw it, thought to myself "That's not right, I better fix that." Now I guess there's no need to fix it--let it live in infamy, a testament to the imperfect nature of, well, me.
I was once mocked on another forum for spelling "definitely" correctly - the heckler informed me the word was "definately".
There are those in Gov and their wingnut groupies that want it at $8/gallon. There have been those that have floated the idea of a "floating" gas tax to get it to $4/gallon with an adustable tax. For example if you are currently paying $2.60/gallon, the floating tax would be $1.40/gallon. Therefore, I don't think the current prices are a concern.
What would be so wrong about a fixed price? That would make more incentive for the government to stop the oil companies gouging the consumer. $4 might be a little high but then again, it's approaching that in California already (premium anyway).
Another benefit of a fixed price would be the ability to factor in the cost when budgeting.
Yet another benefit would be to put pressure on the car manufacturers to make their cars do more MPG.