Today we had some extra time in children’s church. Of course I was willing to fill it by leading the children in some of their favorite songs. They chose a song I taught them two or three years ago. It’s a favorite, and we all know it by heart, but we haven’t sung it in several months.
I could not remember how it started, so I asked the children who could remember the first line (yes, I’m clever that way). Several children volunteered different “first lines,” but none of them sounded familiar to me. Could they have forgotten one of our favorite songs?
I asked the pianist to play the first line, to remind us how it started, and she played a snippet of melody with one hand. It was completely unfamiliar. I swear, I had never heard that song before. I repeated the name of the song, thinking she must be playing something else. But she just nodded and repeated the unfamiliar melody.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I told her to play the introduction, and hopefully we’d all remember it when it was time to sing. And indeed, within a measure of the introduction, the song dropped into place like an old friend, and I sang it without hesitation. But I sure didn’t recognize it from just the snippets of melody and the first line!
It reminds me of something that happened when I was working at Arizona State University to pay my tuition. I was secretary to a chemistry professor, and I did a lot of transcribing with a dictaphone from microcassettes. I was good at it: fast and accurate, and I’d gotten the job because on my practice test, I’d spelled unknown chemical names and processes correctly, just by sounding them out.
Well, one day, for whatever reason, I was merrily typing away, and I got to an common, one-syllable word we all use every day. But I could NOT remember how to spell it. I backed up the tape, tried to turn off my over-analytical brain, and took another run at the sentence. Nothing. I did fine up to that word, but then my brain just stalled. I could not spell it. I tried spelling it phonetically, but nothing looked right. I checked my little pamphlet of “Commonly Misspelled Words,” but it wasn’t listed. I even tried looking it up in the dictionary, but it’s impossible to find a word in the dictionary if you don’t know how to spell it!
I spent probably 15 or 20 minutes trying to figure out how to spell this simple, familiar word, but eventually I had to give up. I asked my boss.
To his credit, he said nothing, simply spelled the word for me (though he did give me a VERY strange, “Are you serious?!” look). And of course, the moment he did, it was obvious, and I had to laugh at myself for not remembering it.
The word I couldn’t remember how to spell?
“Of.”
June 30, 2008 at 11:04 am |
I have done that occasionally, too (with words, not songs). It only happens once or twice a year, and its one of those amazingly common words like what or who. It will just look wrong.
What I do sometimes with any word I don’t know (because I usually write on the computer) is put it in my word document and if its wrong it pops up underlined.
June 30, 2008 at 12:34 pm |
Isn’t it crazy how our brain plays tricks on us? That kind of thing happens to me all the time – with spelling or songs or all kinds of other things in life. I look at a word, and suddenly, it just looks wrong. It’s like how you walk into a room, and suddenly forget why you came in here. Weird!
Shama-Lama, my “best friend” when I’m writing is the Merriam Webster dictionary online. I look up words in that all the time!