Here's how my system works. Take a word, like "dichotomy." If you Google ® it as "d-i-c-h-o-t-e-m-y" (without the hyphens of course) you get eight 813 hits. This means 813 people think you spelled it right. But "d-i-c-h-o-t-o-m-y" with a second "o" gets 12,600,000 votes. Isn't that great?
Sure 813 people think you are wrong, but the other 12,600,000 could beat the phonics out of those guys in a fair fight.
And the next time your son or daughter gets marked down for spelling "dichotomy" with an "e," this data proves that little Johnny or Barbara is entitled to partial credit, at least. Dan Quayle is demanding a recount on his "potato" goof back in 1992. His spelling, "potatoe," gets a respectable 1,300,000 votes on Google. ® But then, "optato" (the typo I entered on my first try) got 924,000.
Search engines don't work well for that. Take "dichotomy." To me it sounds like an operation . . . "They are going to take my dichotomy out next Tuesday.
When I Google ® it there's this big split of opinion. It's like two different schools of thought--two entrenched camps--exist around the meaning of "dichotomy."
Andrew Jackson said, "It is a damn poor mind that cannot think of more than one way to spell a word."
I actually found five versions of Jackson's quote on the net. One site left out the word "damn." Heck, even Nixon deleted expletives. But in this case, the title of the site with this "D" word sensitivity is, "A Hell of a Parentheses." No kidding. Another site attributed the quote to Thomas Jefferson. Many things are attributed to Jefferson lately.
I've figure Jackson's original quote was probably: "It is a damn poor mind indeed that can think of only one way to misquote a President."
-- Horace J. Digby
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