Calling the WordPolice–where are you when we need you?

This will likely come as something of a shock to the Word Police, who I really count on to be on guard against spelling mistakes. But a post which I published earlier today has a serious misspelling.

The correct word spelling is — “irresistible.”
I spelled it “irresistable.”
Now that I am examining them so closely they BOTH look funny.

Please let me explain. It is true, in my defense, that I have turned off auto-correction programs. I know that there are excellent dictionaries online, but my excuse for not consulting those sites is that I don’t know how to access them online without messing up what I am working on–that is toggling between sites on my tablet.

There was a nagging hunch whispering into my ear ever since I published the post with the erroneous spelling. It kept murmuring “… psst…hey, maybe it was spelled with an -ible suffix, instead of -able…” but I ignored it as long as I could before looking it up online.

I do understand why no one caught the misspelling, though. When I see an error when reading someone else’s work, but I always forget about it because that little voice is whispering “Ha…are you sure? Beware of being wrong and looking foolish,” and I just ignore it.

Before I decided to become a Historian, my goal was to study Linguistics. So I spend a lot of time fretting about word origins and etomology. I would have been really anal then…fortunately I was past my language-learning prime.